On Aug 3, 2007, at 9:25 AM, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
I guess the problem is related to this notion of trying to compete
with
MS. If people 'buy' brand A because they like features x,y, and z,
and
brand B has the goal of gaining market share, it will tend to morph
into
a clone (feature-wise) of brand A. However, it will tend to take on
some of the compromises of brand B that go with features x, y, and z.
I stick with debian on my big box because of inertia, the debian
policy,
the debian security support for all packages in debian/main, and the
absolute ease of applying bug fixes with aptitude. Debian also
supports
my trackball mouse's scroll wheel (IMPS/2) whereas OpenBSD does not.
However, my older computers are transitioning away from Debian to BSD
because of the newer debian (perhaps all linuxes) being so much slower
on them than either older debians or new BSDs.
I don't think it's so much Microsoft's influence as it is a
difference in philosophy. Linux distributions put a lot of effort
into being convenient desktop OSs. BSD tends to be aimed more at
servers, where things like hotplugging aren't as important. If you
have to check dmesg for the right device node and then run 'mount' to
access a USB flash drive on a server, it doesn't matter much because
you aren't going to be doing that often. If you have to do that on
your desktop machine every time you plug in your digital camera, it
gets old in a hurry. For that matter, ten years ago Linux
distributions were already doing fully automated installers while
NetBSD and OpenBSD still required you to get out a calculator to
figure out the cylinder boundaries for the slices on your hard disk.
The two OSs just occupy different points on the easy of use vs.
compactness scale.
You see this in hardware support, too. Linux tries to support the
newest stuff, because that's what's in desktop machines (and
sometimes suffers instability because of it), while BSD tends to take
a more conservative approach. Hardware that's seen in desktops but
rarely in servers often isn't supported or maintained well in BSD,
because it's just not a priority. (The 3c509 ethernet driver, for
example, was buggy for *years* in FreeBSD. It never really got
fixed, the cards just became obsolete. ;) Another example: The
Marvell Yukon gigabit ethernet chipset, common in desktops but rare
in servers, is much slower under FreeBSD than under Linux.)
It could be for your particular application, BSD is just the right
tool for the job.
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