On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 10:26:03PM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
what about the kernels? NetBSD - XML parser in the kernel! At least the
Linux kernel maintainers keep some of the crap out. FreeBSD... not
really heard much positive about it, and Stealth used to say it was just
"trying to be Linux" anyway. OpenBSD's hardware support seems to be
around the level of Plan 9's, but at least it's got gcc, eh? Looking
around for something to replace Linux at the end of last year I seriously
got a "why bother" feeling about all the BSDs.
The kernel aside, the BSD userland is actually a lot nicer than
the GNU userland. So is the libc, by a wide margin (although I'm
sure Ulrich Drepper would throw a shit fit at that
pronouncement). There's a lot of GNU cruft thrown in, sadly, but
most of it is pure BSD, and is orders of magnitude simpler than
the GNU equivalent. None of the standard utilities use or need
getopt_long, for one thing. They don't use info pages. The man
pages can actually generally be read in one sitting. Then
there's the init system, which is simple and clean, and matched
by very few linux distros (and even then, they don't do as
well).
As for hardware support, it varies. OpenBSD, as I understand it,
has the best network card support of the lot (which counts for a
lot on a server). Linux has the best video card support (because
manufacturers happen to care about it for the time being).
NetBSD runs on toasters. When it comes to laptops, Linux wins
hands down.
A little careful listening & my feeling became more than just "why
bother". "Cat went to _Berkley_ [not Gnu] and came back waving flags."
It's Berkley that took a good unix and started gluing cruft to it, and
if Gnu has attracted more hackers to glue rubbish onto their stuff, so
what? The attitude is still there, certainly in FreeBSD and NetBSD, so
what reason is there to believe they won't mess up any future features
they take from Plan 9? From what I hear they already have screwed up
union mounts. Union mounts are crucial to Plan 9's design!
Even so, GNU is the primary culprit now, not the BSDs. As for
union mounts, FreeBSD's union mounts are not the same thing as
Plan 9's and they weren't meant to be. There are a few servers
on Plan 9 to provide BSD-like deep union mounts, and they're
widely used.
I'm reminded of Gnome, which takes a few principles from Apple and
utterly misapplies them, with a result I found far less usable than
Windows 98.
Amen.
--
Kris Maglione
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it
ceases to exist.
--Salman Rushdie
