*BSD News Article 88409


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From: craig@gnofn.org (Craig Johnston)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD
Date: 4 Feb 1997 17:01:45 -0600
Organization: Greater New Orleans Freenet
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Message-ID: <5d8f4p$jto@junkie.gnofn.org>
References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <slrn5feb63.93l.ralsina@ultra7.unl.edu.ar> <32F73973.167EB0E7@freebsd.org> <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net>
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In article <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net>,
Bennett Todd <bet@nospam.interactive.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 04 Feb 1997 08:28:19 -0500, John S. Dyson <dyson@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>>One reason that we have the Linux emulator (and EXT2FS) is to ease the
>>upgrade to FreeBSD from Linux.
>
>I've never heard of anybody going that way. Why would they want to? Have you

You've been leading a rather sheltered life.  I and more than a few
others I have known have moved from Linux to FreeBSD.  

Why would they want to?  1 distribution, a source tree, cleaner code,
better-engineered feel, BSD heritage, better handling of large loads
last I checked (maybe the Linux scheduler has improved since then),
superior networking performance (again, as of last I used LInux.)
and probably a host of others.

A lot of this is feel-stuff.  To me, and to many others, Linux has
a "spit and chewing gum", "damn correctness, full speed ahead!"
feel to it, whereas FreeBSD feels solid and reassuring and like it
was written with correctness as a prime design goal.

>improved FreeBSD to the point where it's now as fast as Linux, or runs as

To tell you the truth, I've never noticed subjectively any speed
difference between the two under negligible load.  By stopwatch
I'm sure one leads the other by some negligible amount on most
tasks.  Can you feel the difference?  How badly do you want to feel
the difference?

As of the last Linux version I ran, FreeBSD felt noticeably more
responsive under load to me.  I used to run a number of fairly
large mailing lists and an anonymous remailer.  

>stably? Then once you port it to the Alpha (I've upgraded from PCs) I'll give

"runs as stably" ?  You must be joking.  Do you have any data on FreeBSD
crashing on any sort of reasonable hardware?  I sure don't.  Neither
Linux or FreeBSD have ever crashed on me under reasonable circumstances.  

(unreasonable includes doing some SCSI programming on Linux, the single
hang or crash I've witnessed on either of these OSs, directly
attributable to me doing Bad Things.)

Oh, BTW, you want NetBSD if you want to run on an Alpha.  

comp.os.linux.setup trimmed.