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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!Germany.EU.net!ieunet!maths.tcd.ie!maths.tcd.ie!not-for-mail From: tim@maths.tcd.ie (Timothy Murphy) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD Date: 26 Aug 1995 16:41:50 +0100 Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Lines: 45 Message-ID: <41nfbu$sg@bell.maths.tcd.ie> References: <409iah$inf@galaxy.ucr.edu> <40alp5$psg@agate.berkeley.edu> <413bkc$3t2@kadath.zeitgeist.net> <1995Aug24.222509.28085@state.systems.sa.gov.au> <41ko58$rqh@hamilton.maths.tcd.ie> <41l9eo$17h@park.uvsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bell.maths.tcd.ie Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> writes: >Documentation is an issue, but it's also a red herring. There is >a significant amount of printed literature that deals with BSD >and UNIX that is directly applicable to BSD. It's just not >necessarily labelled "BSD". The Linux documentation that exists >is rarely more useful than the printed materials not specific to >BSD when it comes to doing "interesting things". The main cry >in these cases (like writing device drivers) is that "the source >code is the documentation". I'm really speaking only for the "hoi polloi", not for system hackers or Unix gurus. Most people getting a free Unix are not going to buy books to see how it should be run. Linux has excellent books as part of the standard distribution; FreeBSD does not. In my opinion this is the major single reason why 10 times as many people use Linux as FreeBSD. [There was a rather similar issue with TeX/LaTeX. There used to be many other macro packages similar to LaTeX, some of them I've no doubt as good if not better. But LaTeX came with a comprehensive manual, which at the time was part of the package -- now you have to pay for it -- and that in my view was why LaTeX has buried its competitors.] Again, this is not a flame against FreeBSD; it is just a suggestion that if people are interested in promoting FreeBSD for use by ordinary users like me they would be much wiser to look to the documentation provided with the system rather than to esoteric issues of networking efficiency which might perhaps arise if one was using a Unix box as a file server but simply never occur when using a PC as a single-user machine. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland