Indeed. I had a hunch that it must be something evil, and sure enough, soon I found proof:
**** THE PROOF THAT D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. IS EVIL ****
D O U O S V A V V M 68 79 85 79 83 86 65 86 86 77 - as ASCII values 5 7 4 7 2 5 2 5 5 5 - digits added \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ 3 2 7 7 1 - digits added
Thus, "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M." is 32771.
Turn the number backwards, and add 1834 - the year Vesuvius erupted. The number is now 19557.
Subtract 4591 from the number - this is the year Elvis recorded his debut single, putting the end to all morality and good taste, written backwards. It gives 14966.
Subtract 7, the sacred number of Illuminati. The result will be 14959.
Add 7691 to it - this is the year Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia, written backwards - you will get 22650.
Turn the number backwards, subtract 1952 - the year killer fog haunted London. The number is now 3670.
This number, read as octal, gives 1976 - the year George Harrison performed the lumberjack song with Monty Python - if you have seen it, you should understand.
This is truly evil. QED.
Good thing we have evilfinder to help see the TRUTH!
"Let's see Debian doesn't have to meet any ridgidly imposed deadlines, so they don't have to relase a shoddy product, and then quickly have to follow up their release with a slew of patches/service packs/errata. Show me a commerical software vendor that releases fresh packages that don't have a mile long patch list shortly after release."
This is a typical Debian myth: being up to date and being stable can't go hand in hand. Its a poor justification for KDE 2 in the their most recent "stable" release. Being current and being stable isn't impossible! A case in point: FreeBSD. 4.10 comes with kde 3.2.2, gnome 2.6.x, well, the latest and the greatest - yet it is arguably as stable as any Debian release. If it can be done with fbsd, it can be done in linux as well.
Once deb users can see beyond that myth and deb devels begin to take such criticism seriously will debian as a distribution flourish again. I emphasised distribution, for I think debian ceased to be one, and became some sort of framework, a base on which other distros can be based on (like knoppix, lindows, meppis, whatever).
"so where does that leave me? i've got a rh9 that is end of life and i reall don't want to switch to the debian chaos."
Hey, I still use RH 8.0 (Psyche) - works fine here;)
bash-2.05b$ cat/usr/compat/linux/etc/redhat-release/usr/compat/linux/proc/version Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche) Linux version 2.4.2 (des@freebsd.org) (gcc version 3.3.3 [FreeBSD] 20031106) #4 Sun Dec 18 04:30:00 CET 1977
Seriously though - if you are not unconfortable with the command line, why not try FreeBSD? Its as stable as Debian and packages are as up to date (well, except for the linux kernel:o)) as in Fedora. I only say this because I know exactly your dilemma - I had the same thoughts half a year ago...
I followed the whole damn rediculous case. Get them on their licencing practices, not on this baseless Media Player argument.
Now that's something I can agree with wholeheartedly. No wander the EU decision created frictions in the OpenSource community. Licencing on reasonable terms or royalties might be just impossible from a GPL point of view. What they should be forced to is to open up closed formats like.doc, media, etc that don't have substantial benefit except vendor lock-in (benefit for MS). Generally: make their OS/technologies interoperable, especially in cases where its +5 Obvious that there are no customer benefits or superb technologies involved (another example besides.doc: NTFS filesystem) and prevent bastardization (embrace and extend) of standard technologies.
Your seven-page microdefence is in pdf - which is a good crossplatform format. Now if was in.doc, users without oo.org might have difficulty reading it. But consider this: oo developers had to spend considerale resources to integrate compatibility with MS office format. There isn't anything that makes.doc format superiour or more advantageous for the users than open alternatives. There is no secret formulat there except for one: a closed and constantly changing format makes hard for alternative office suites to compete. And that's what monopoly in conjunction with condemned practices is about.
Thanks for your ignorance again - it was fun stating the obvious (and it was just a simple example, if you were minimally inclined to think before you c&p for karma, you could have come up with zillions of examples that would show why MS's claims are half-truths and plainly wrong in the larger picture. Besides, this was explained plenty of times before here on./ for the likes of you, but you keep beating the./ is biased drum without addressing these explanations.
because you blatantly ignore the fact that different rules apply for companies in a monopoly position (they have special obligations) - thus forcing./ readers to explain again and again and again the obvious - very tiresome.
IMHO, "Go ahead, mod me down for common sense...." type of disclaimers to avoid bad moderation are very cheap
bonus reason: Nice cut&paste job to have a comment at the top as fast as possible, with no substantial (except for your wish to be modded down) content.
Re:Sorry, someone had to say it
on
KDE 3.2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think they are more arrogant than any business. Your gripe seems to be with this: "most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes." They don't say there are no alternatives, they say they are the best. Prove them wrong before you say they're arrogant. KDE has more features and applications available than the other Window Managers/Desktop Environments combined. Underneath you'll find a clean and component based codebase - and face it, QT is far more advanced than alternative FREE toolkits.
In fact, that's where Bruce Perens was wrong when said QT being GPL, its not as attractive for business as the LGPL gtk. And yes, QT development is very much tied to KDE development (some of the KDE developers also work for Trolltech). So despite now LGPL being considered more free (what a turn of events!), they have every right to claim that KDE is the most advanced Free desktop for gnu/linux and other unices. It has the same technology that the following companies choose to licence, despite the alleged 'high' cost (if they payed, it must be THAT good):
Of course, there are many points that can be successfully argued in favor of other alternatives, but we don't have to strech the truth too much (unlike other company ads - "Secure By Design" anyone?) to argue that they have the most powerful/advanced desktop solutions. In other words, they are not only do what everyone else does (marketing), but they also do it from a defendable position. There is nothing wrong with that, and you must be from Mars or something to consider it arrogance. (Or, despite the usual 'I'm objective cause I use both' disclaimar, you might be one of those 'G' zealots:-P)
gp:"I mean, really, it's not like Hungarian is terribly exotic."
Well, it's not terribly exotic if we look at usage - there are many many languages that have fewer speakers. OTOH it is exotic inasmuch as it doesn't have any relatives in the surrounding countries - its not slavic, it doesn't have anything to do with germanic or latin 'derivatives', and linguists think that even the finnish relation is strained. So it is a small miracle that it survived at all for 1000+ years.
CP: "AFAIK almost all hackers know english ESR states it va sa requirement) opens up the market you have access to dramatically and we all now Apple can use as much of it as possible."
Well, major OSs are translated - hungarian MS Windows follows the english debut by only a few weeks (same with Office). KDE has excellent hungarian support, FreeBSD has a hungarian section, etc. The unfortunate thing is that MS thinks of us as a significant market, for our government (the last one) payed them tons of money to force down MS products on the throats of students and workers in higher education. So me, as a student, I'm now entitled to a freely downloadable (its called microsoft campus) Windows XP professional, and Office XP. What really sucks is that I use neither, yet indirectly, my usage for these software was already payed for.
Ok, what about this scenario: I am a spammer, and intentionally leave my windows pc unpatched or even 'install' a worm which I know will send emails to all the addresses I have.
The f*cktards can even modify worms to send out specific spam emails...
Yeah, and he wants to convince us that Java is even more 'free' in some respects than GPL software. Of course, he doesn't lie when he basically claims: GPL = share your code for your apps JAVA = test for compatibility. Sounds nice and reasonable.
Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code. But the sources for the JDK do come with a license that has a different catch: redistribution requires compatibility testing.
This is just context for the real point I want to make: When you have platform software like Linux or the JDK, the platform interface (in the case of Java, the VM and API specifications) divides the world of developers into two groups: those who work under the interface to implement it, and those who work above the interface and build applications based on it.
What he forgets to mention is how much does this compatibility test cost. The FreeBSD Foundation has been pouring money into making possible a binary redistribution of JAVA, and they ran out of money (so we only get JDK 1.3 in binary form). Of course, you can have native JDK 1.4.2 on any FreeBSD if you compile it from source (with the minor inconvenience of having to download the sources manually), but still... If you think of it, having to go through the costly process of 'testing for compatibility' is absurd in the case of FreeBSD. Aside from a few BSD specific patches, the source is the same, the resulting binary is 99.999% the same as in linux and runs as well too.
The 'viral infection' part seems also strangely familiar (hello Ballmer). So I believe RMS is right here. FreeBSD is still a good development platform (netcraft runs on freebsd, apache.org likewise, and apache is partly developed on freebsd). Also, SUN's early versions of Solaris were based on BSD, which makes this kinda ironic: yeah we used your codebase, but no, you have to pay us big money for binary java (which, of course, is FREE, right?). Not that developers really mind compiling JDK from source (afterall, fsbd is a source based distribution) - but the industry does. The "Is FreeBSD a JAVA platform that is 100% supported by SUN?" (no) question precedes the "Does FreeBSD have native JDK?" (yes) question in many cases. SUN knows very well that they have more (monetary) control over JAVA this way, since they have control over the certification process. Seeing how they would like to squeeze out money from a volunteer project, especially considering that you only have to go over a few lines of code (that don't really touch the core of JDK) makes Gosling's somewhat self-righteous comments on RMS and the GPL stink.
Well, I am not a programmer, that's why I've been reluctant to send in PRs - for the reasons you cited: I didn't/don't want to congest their database, which seems to be overloaded all the time btw. Not that poorly written PRs are their fault... They have excellent guidelines useful for us noobs as well.
On the other hand, (good) PRs are very important. I've been (I am still) very critical about the quality of gentoo (my roommate uses it, and since he is a *nix novice, I had the pleasure/pain of figuring out some stuff in gentoo), but I saw on their forums developers (ebuild-maintainers to be precise) complaining about the lack of bugreports.
So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.
somewhat related: I filed only ports-related bug reports. 3 of them. One was a disaster as far as writing a pr goes - it was my very first one, and forgot to fill out the how to reproduce the error part. I never expected a reply to that one, but eventually, someone after 2 months replied:)
The replies to the other 2 PRs were more than exemplary. I got replies (and patches) in less than 2 hours for my reports on wine not compiling and amarok using using up all kern.maxproc. This, of course, doesn't mean that src folks are as much diligent as ports folks are, but the few times I browsed the -current and other mailing lists, devs. seemed friendly and helpful most of the time. Just my 2cents.
Do you know why GNU su doesn't support the wheel group (well, I think it does now, but it didn't for a time). Because RMS opined that it creates a divide between those with power and those without. (Actually I found this jewel in this this thread, so credit isn't mine...
manpage is from SUSE 6.1...
Why GNU su does not support the wheel group (by Richard Stallman) Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
Actually I respect the guy: he is a man with strong principles, and I admire him for that. Given the historical context (1984) this isn't as silly as it sounds now. Without the internet this wasn't as much a security threat as it is today. But there is no excuse for linux distributions (second half of 90's) to follow that policy (or did they just take su for what it is - e.g. no wheel support - without looking at the outdated and by now somewhat silly reasons?).
April's fool day on./ featuring RMS... when I saw it, I thought I'd share this cute (I'd say funny) piece of history, but again, no disrespect intended. Although being somewhat cynical is en vogue in nerd circles (unfortunately and boringly), when I say I respect RMS for what he is and for what he represents, I mean it.
flamebait... lol. So the subtle but boring GNOME follows Mac OS 9/X (./ idol for a desktop) while KDE follows Windows (not exactly idolized around here) wasn't. Besides, what I wrote is true. b) is only what parent suggested, a) is what KDE/Konqueror is capable of right now. Ironically, it is OS X which has similar system-wide pdf support, and according to this review, KDE has the better implementation (along with better network transparency).
"Although it isn't completely clear cut, it seems that KDE takes a lot of inspiration from Windows Explorer (yes I know it does a lot more), while Gnome seems more like MacOS Finder (but isn't as good yet). I guess the majority of computer users (including the/. crowd) comes from a Windows background, which may explain why they feel more at home in KDE than Gnome."
Your second statement is not necessarily related to the first one. Rather, it boils down to this question: which one would you prefer?
a) An application that outperforms its windows equivalent in every respect (d&d ripping of cds, split views, embedded everything, including pdf viewer/converter - you can print anything to pdf in KDE - media-player, multi-protocol - fish, ftp, www, smb - lan browser without the necessity to mount those shares, in-line spellchecker to please grammar-nazis here on./, etc. in one consistent interface.
b) An application that doesn't perform as well as its Mac OS 9 equivalent from the last century.
"If you want a whole bunch of perfectly useless features, filling the user's screen of coloured icons..."
Like those perfectly useless applets for your system tray like knotes, which has been part of the 'bloat' often attributed to KDE...
oh, btw, from the review on ArsTechnica:
Our favorite new applet by far is the Post-It note-style applet, which lets you paste notes to yourself on your desktop (much like the Post-It notes that decorate many a monitor's front), and remains sticky between sessions.
"Submit a post there asking which of Linux or FreeBSD should be used for a high performance server? Which is more stable? Which has a higher performance networking stack? Which is more scalable? Etc etc."
Submit the same post on a linux forum;) I don't believe anyone on bsdforums would tell you to install bsd on a >4 processor machine (because they won't recommend the 'new technology release' of the 5.x series, and SMP in 4.x simply sucks. As to stability/security: YMMV. And opinions may vary. Linux is as secure as an admin makes it - and it can be as secure as FreeBSD. In My Personal Experience(tm) it was easier to set up a secure FreeBSD than to secure a linux distro (even Debian). That's because the FreeBSD command line (man pages, system layout, config files) are very easy to read and edit.
Of course, giving my reasons for saying that would need a much lenghtier elaboration of this, but a short example: the FreeBSD firewall, ipfw. It has an almost english syntax:
ipfw add 1000 permit all from me to any out via rl0 # this will permit every outgoing # connection from my machine via a specific interface. # I could have also written: allow ip from <my ip address> to any xmit rl0 #or pass ip from... #you get the picture # and here is how it looks like when you create a stateful firewall rule: check-state ipfw add 1000 permit all from me to any out via rl0 setup keep-state
Of course, I can say FreeBSD was easier to set up for me given the specific purpose of that machine. At the same time, I agree with the Mandrake post, inasmuch as Mandrake is a far better solution if you want to replace your XP with a free OS, but don't want to deal with the CLI.
So yes, some points might create disagreement in discussing linux vs. freebsd. But there are multiple ways dealing with the issue. For instance, one could say: "the linux console driver sux0rz" This is Very Bad. Or one can say: There isn't separate scrollback buffer for each terminal. When you switch, it gets erased. As a result, it is easier to select a portion of screen output (without using 3rd party application) with a mouse, and paste it in an editor on another terminal. Moreover, you can set the scrollback buffer to an arbitrary number of lines.
Both descriptions have some truth in them. But I would undoubtedly label the former as trolling while the latter as informed (informative). Between the two, there are myriad ways to express this difference. It is up to your individual taste to decide on the point that makes it flambait/trolling. As to the post that lead to this discussion: I don't like the grand(grand-grand) parent's post. But it is my opinion that the reply describing it as flamebait was much more a flamebait than the original. Implicitly (and it wasn't that implicit) it suggests that the BSD community at large is what he perceived the parent post's attitude to be (putting words in his mouth that never left it).
Back to your original suggestion. I can point you to many linux related questions on that forum (the example above is not uncommon or outstanding in any way). And the usual reply to such questions isn't something like use BSD instead of linux. In fact, old time BSD users would recommend linux (on bsdforums!) if they know BSD doesn't suit the task at hand. Here is an example for that. Abe_the_Man probably went for a linux solution (seeing how he didn't post there anymore) - and as you can see he was recommended to use linux on bsdforums. In this post you can see many positive rem
"There is a very strong anti-Linux feeling from all levels of the BSD community."
I don't know why you say that. Care to point out where can you see serious linux bashing sessions in the BSD community? (I'm not interested in years old derogatory statements/jokes). BSDforums has its own linux section, for instance. Occasionally linux newbies post there - and you won't see 'hey, use bsd instead' remarks there. People simply try to help. Or just a few minutes ago I saw this post - talking very positively (gasp!) about a linux distro in the middle of bsdforums (gasp again!) - and see the replies? No flames - just friendly discussion.
Now, on the other hand, I could point you to gentoo-forums posts that are very much against the BSDs. I think what you try to do here is simply smear the bsd community with FUD - the 'examples' you give are years old (and at that time, linux was in its infancy, so some things might have been even true - no offense). I myself came from a Mandrake background btw - which has an excellent community, both on mandrakeusers.org and pclinuxonline. And the FreeBSD community was as welcoming and tolerant to my early blunders that any linux distro would be proud for such a great user community. (I never saw RTFM posts - even if someone blatantly ignored/refused to read any documentation, the excellent handbook was pointed out as an important resource in a civil manner).
Slashdot Mirror
online version of evilfinder: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/evilfinder/ef.shtml
ps. 6+8=14=>1+4=5
You do that, and I'll delete that long-dormant toor account from /etc/passwd ;)
The word you were looking for was pr0ts..
This is a typical Debian myth: being up to date and being stable can't go hand in hand. Its a poor justification for KDE 2 in the their most recent "stable" release. Being current and being stable isn't impossible! A case in point: FreeBSD. 4.10 comes with kde 3.2.2, gnome 2.6.x, well, the latest and the greatest - yet it is arguably as stable as any Debian release. If it can be done with fbsd, it can be done in linux as well.
Once deb users can see beyond that myth and deb devels begin to take such criticism seriously will debian as a distribution flourish again. I emphasised distribution, for I think debian ceased to be one, and became some sort of framework, a base on which other distros can be based on (like knoppix, lindows, meppis, whatever).
Hey, I still use RH 8.0 (Psyche) - works fine here ;)
Seriously though - if you are not unconfortable with the command line, why not try FreeBSD? Its as stable as Debian and packages are as up to date (well, except for the linux kernelNow that's something I can agree with wholeheartedly. No wander the EU decision created frictions in the OpenSource community. Licencing on reasonable terms or royalties might be just impossible from a GPL point of view. What they should be forced to is to open up closed formats like .doc, media, etc that don't have substantial benefit except vendor lock-in (benefit for MS). Generally: make their OS/technologies interoperable, especially in cases where its +5 Obvious that there are no customer benefits or superb technologies involved (another example besides .doc: NTFS filesystem) and prevent bastardization (embrace and extend) of standard technologies.
Thanks for your ignorance again - it was fun stating the obvious (and it was just a simple example, if you were minimally inclined to think before you c&p for karma, you could have come up with zillions of examples that would show why MS's claims are half-truths and plainly wrong in the larger picture. Besides, this was explained plenty of times before here on ./ for the likes of you, but you keep beating the ./ is biased drum without addressing these explanations.
Ok, my post sucked, I apologize. Bad day.
In fact, that's where Bruce Perens was wrong when said QT being GPL, its not as attractive for business as the LGPL gtk. And yes, QT development is very much tied to KDE development (some of the KDE developers also work for Trolltech). So despite now LGPL being considered more free (what a turn of events!), they have every right to claim that KDE is the most advanced Free desktop for gnu/linux and other unices. It has the same technology that the following companies choose to licence, despite the alleged 'high' cost (if they payed, it must be THAT good):
- EPA (European Space Agency)
- Volvo
- Opera
- Adobe
- Sony
- IBM
- NASA
- Boeing
- And a lot more
Of course, there are many points that can be successfully argued in favor of other alternatives, but we don't have to strech the truth too much (unlike other company ads - "Secure By Design" anyone?) to argue that they have the most powerful/advanced desktop solutions. In other words, they are not only do what everyone else does (marketing), but they also do it from a defendable position. There is nothing wrong with that, and you must be from Mars or something to consider it arrogance. (Or, despite the usual 'I'm objective cause I use both' disclaimar, you might be one of those 'G' zealotsDo you often talk to yourself?
Well, it's not terribly exotic if we look at usage - there are many many languages that have fewer speakers. OTOH it is exotic inasmuch as it doesn't have any relatives in the surrounding countries - its not slavic, it doesn't have anything to do with germanic or latin 'derivatives', and linguists think that even the finnish relation is strained. So it is a small miracle that it survived at all for 1000+ years.
CP: "AFAIK almost all hackers know english ESR states it va sa requirement) opens up the market you have access to dramatically and we all now Apple can use as much of it as possible."
Well, major OSs are translated - hungarian MS Windows follows the english debut by only a few weeks (same with Office). KDE has excellent hungarian support, FreeBSD has a hungarian section, etc. The unfortunate thing is that MS thinks of us as a significant market, for our government (the last one) payed them tons of money to force down MS products on the throats of students and workers in higher education. So me, as a student, I'm now entitled to a freely downloadable (its called microsoft campus) Windows XP professional, and Office XP. What really sucks is that I use neither, yet indirectly, my usage for these software was already payed for.
The f*cktards can even modify worms to send out specific spam emails ...
Well, the guy is already 95% there :))))
The 'viral infection' part seems also strangely familiar (hello Ballmer). So I believe RMS is right here. FreeBSD is still a good development platform (netcraft runs on freebsd, apache.org likewise, and apache is partly developed on freebsd). Also, SUN's early versions of Solaris were based on BSD, which makes this kinda ironic: yeah we used your codebase, but no, you have to pay us big money for binary java (which, of course, is FREE, right?). Not that developers really mind compiling JDK from source (afterall, fsbd is a source based distribution) - but the industry does. The "Is FreeBSD a JAVA platform that is 100% supported by SUN?" (no) question precedes the "Does FreeBSD have native JDK?" (yes) question in many cases. SUN knows very well that they have more (monetary) control over JAVA this way, since they have control over the certification process. Seeing how they would like to squeeze out money from a volunteer project, especially considering that you only have to go over a few lines of code (that don't really touch the core of JDK) makes Gosling's somewhat self-righteous comments on RMS and the GPL stink.
On the other hand, (good) PRs are very important. I've been (I am still) very critical about the quality of gentoo (my roommate uses it, and since he is a *nix novice, I had the pleasure/pain of figuring out some stuff in gentoo), but I saw on their forums developers (ebuild-maintainers to be precise) complaining about the lack of bugreports.
So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.
The replies to the other 2 PRs were more than exemplary. I got replies (and patches) in less than 2 hours for my reports on wine not compiling and amarok using using up all kern.maxproc. This, of course, doesn't mean that src folks are as much diligent as ports folks are, but the few times I browsed the -current and other mailing lists, devs. seemed friendly and helpful most of the time. Just my 2cents.
April's fool day on ./ featuring RMS ... when I saw it, I thought I'd share this cute (I'd say funny) piece of history, but again, no disrespect intended. Although being somewhat cynical is en vogue in nerd circles (unfortunately and boringly), when I say I respect RMS for what he is and for what he represents, I mean it.
Oh, well...
Your second statement is not necessarily related to the first one. Rather, it boils down to this question: which one would you prefer?
amaroK uses the windows key (my favourite juk replacement). WIN + ZXCVB (Prev, Play, Pause, Stop, Next).
Like those perfectly useless applets for your system tray like knotes, which has been part of the 'bloat' often attributed to KDE...
oh, btw, from the review on ArsTechnica:
Submit the same post on a linux forum ;) I don't believe anyone on bsdforums would tell you to install bsd on a >4 processor machine (because they won't recommend the 'new technology release' of the 5.x series, and SMP in 4.x simply sucks. As to stability/security: YMMV. And opinions may vary. Linux is as secure as an admin makes it - and it can be as secure as FreeBSD. In My Personal Experience(tm) it was easier to set up a secure FreeBSD than to secure a linux distro (even Debian). That's because the FreeBSD command line (man pages, system layout, config files) are very easy to read and edit.
Of course, giving my reasons for saying that would need a much lenghtier elaboration of this, but a short example: the FreeBSD firewall, ipfw. It has an almost english syntax:
Of course, I can say FreeBSD was easier to set up for me given the specific purpose of that machine. At the same time, I agree with the Mandrake post, inasmuch as Mandrake is a far better solution if you want to replace your XP with a free OS, but don't want to deal with the CLI.
So yes, some points might create disagreement in discussing linux vs. freebsd. But there are multiple ways dealing with the issue. For instance, one could say: "the linux console driver sux0rz" This is Very Bad. Or one can say: There isn't separate scrollback buffer for each terminal. When you switch, it gets erased. As a result, it is easier to select a portion of screen output (without using 3rd party application) with a mouse, and paste it in an editor on another terminal. Moreover, you can set the scrollback buffer to an arbitrary number of lines.
Both descriptions have some truth in them. But I would undoubtedly label the former as trolling while the latter as informed (informative). Between the two, there are myriad ways to express this difference. It is up to your individual taste to decide on the point that makes it flambait/trolling. As to the post that lead to this discussion: I don't like the grand(grand-grand) parent's post. But it is my opinion that the reply describing it as flamebait was much more a flamebait than the original. Implicitly (and it wasn't that implicit) it suggests that the BSD community at large is what he perceived the parent post's attitude to be (putting words in his mouth that never left it).
Back to your original suggestion. I can point you to many linux related questions on that forum (the example above is not uncommon or outstanding in any way). And the usual reply to such questions isn't something like use BSD instead of linux. In fact, old time BSD users would recommend linux (on bsdforums!) if they know BSD doesn't suit the task at hand. Here is an example for that. Abe_the_Man probably went for a linux solution (seeing how he didn't post there anymore) - and as you can see he was recommended to use linux on bsdforums. In this post you can see many positive rem
I don't know why you say that. Care to point out where can you see serious linux bashing sessions in the BSD community? (I'm not interested in years old derogatory statements/jokes). BSDforums has its own linux section, for instance. Occasionally linux newbies post there - and you won't see 'hey, use bsd instead' remarks there. People simply try to help. Or just a few minutes ago I saw this post - talking very positively (gasp!) about a linux distro in the middle of bsdforums (gasp again!) - and see the replies? No flames - just friendly discussion.
Now, on the other hand, I could point you to gentoo-forums posts that are very much against the BSDs. I think what you try to do here is simply smear the bsd community with FUD - the 'examples' you give are years old (and at that time, linux was in its infancy, so some things might have been even true - no offense). I myself came from a Mandrake background btw - which has an excellent community, both on mandrakeusers.org and pclinuxonline. And the FreeBSD community was as welcoming and tolerant to my early blunders that any linux distro would be proud for such a great user community. (I never saw RTFM posts - even if someone blatantly ignored/refused to read any documentation, the excellent handbook was pointed out as an important resource in a civil manner).