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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-pull.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-ana-7.sprintlink.net!news.rns.net!news.van.rns.net!news.tvinet.com!amd40.wecs.org!herb.wecs.org!duane From: duane@herb.wecs.org (Duane Eddingfield) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD Followup-To: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc Date: 28 Jan 1997 05:33:05 GMT Organization: A FreeBSD box. Lines: 45 Message-ID: <5ck32h$e7r@amd40.wecs.org> References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <5c155c$p6u@raven.eva.net> <m23evrulla.fsf@desk.crynwr.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: dial9.tvinet.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:154983 comp.os.linux.networking:66551 comp.os.linux.setup:94483 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5789 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2108 Russell Nelson (nelson@crynwr.com) wrote: : cjs@cynic.portal.ca (Curt Sampson) writes: : > 2. Binary-focus vs. source-focus. Linux is focused on people who : > prefer to avoid compilers if at all possible. I don't know anyone : > who regularly builds a full Linux userland from source. (I'm not : > even sure a buildable full userland source tree exists.) The : > installation tools for binary packages tend to be better than those : > under BSD systems. The BSD developers have much better configuration : > and source code control, and much better build systems. : Right. It's a different focus. Linux is aimed at people who want to : use it, whereas FreeBSD is aimed at people who want to work on it. : The latter is a much smaller group of people. Ahhh, excuse me but the reason *I* switched from Linux to FreeBSD was because I could use it *WITHOUT* working on it! I admit that this ocurred back when Linux started switching from a.out to ELF executables but it drove me nuts how much stuff I had to find and get installed to do any given thing! FreeBSD would just work for me! I could do what I wanted to do without having to find the right version of yet another library... When RedHat 4.0 came out I decided to take a look at Linux again but it was still the same, you gotta hunt all over the world for stuff and spend all your time building an environment to do something. So then I installed OpenBSD, much better. I'm interested to see the new Caldera release, and I hear that the Debian distribution is good, but that probably means that its approaching what FreeBSD has been for a long time. : > 3. Advocacy. The Linux folks are a lot more rabid. :-) : It's called "good marketing". I spoke to one Freebsd fan[atic] who : dissed Linux's internal design. He was totally down on Linux. But he : had no clue about the need to market software (a frequent failing on : the part of technical people). Linux's marketing is heads and : shoulders above FreeBSD's. Yeah and Micro$oft's marketing is much much better than either :-) It's looking to like an OS's quality is inversly proportional to its marketing effort. </Duane>