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The Case for FreeBSD
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 27, 2005 01:34 PM
from the i-don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.
from the i-don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.
essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the
accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is
a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of
their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."
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hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
One serious thing about FreeBSD over linux distro's... It feels like it has more of a structure, especially when installing utilities and apps... I find with linux distros, the stuff included feels like it's all over the place, hard to find where things end up installing... but I'm really a vxworks fan... so take what I say with a grain of salt...
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally this is true - this is the reason I restrict myself to Debian. With Debian, everything is packaged in the same manner, to the same standards, and it all makes sense. The structure makes it the only Linux distribution I'm willing to spend any time on.
When I tried FreeBSD, I felt that it had mu
Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without advocacy, your product/whatever will seem inadequate, small, meaningless. This will make your whatever simply useless in the eyes of those who have not decided for themselves at the moment.
People who are not making money out of this have all to lose if they don't get the advocacy they need. They don't have marketing might, and advocacy is all they have. The moment they lose advocacy, they lose mindshare, they lose users. They will them either wither and cease to exist, or become mediocre and simply unimportant, a relic of the past, with the people unwilling to just move on.
You have already decided what you need/want. This makes advocacy useless for you. For the rest of those who have not finalized that decision, they need this stuff to understand the advantages as viewed by those who use the stuff.
Of course, you are also advocating Linux and NetBSD by stating you use those. You didn't give hard facts, but it's still advocacy in a simpler form.
Parent
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Interesting)
To answer your question: You lose.
Linus Torvalds has said that the idea behind Linux is "do it yourself". The idea behind BSD -- coming, as it does, from an academic background -- is "there's lots of trash out there. Let's give people something better".
As far as providing people with a better alternative is concerned, writing FreeBSD doesn't accomplish much if everyone keeps on running the Linux distribution of the day.
Parent
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:3, Insightful)
If hardly anyone were using FreeBSD because they thought it "sucked", then there would be far fewer people willing to develop FreeBSD.
Those who are developing it would find their efforts less fruitful, because fewer people would exist to fix bugs and improve on their work... eventually FreeBSD would go the way of the Amiga... a few diehard users stll existing, but essenti
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually there's a key difference. Most marketing is carefully directed at potential new customers. Most "advocacy" takes place in forums specifically designed for advocacy (comp.*.advocacy, slashdot, ars technica battlefront, etc), where a tiny number of relatively knowlegable users quibble amongst themselves for kicks.
Let's take this very article as an example. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have relatively small userbases which primarily consists of Unix and BSD-saavy users. Neither project has very much to gain by converting the other's users. (Unless there really is some threat of one or the other dying.) Either project would have much more to gain trying to convert the HUGE market of fleeing commercial UNIX users instead of arguing amongst themselves. You'll notice that's what RedHat is doing rather than trying to pick off Debian customers.
Parent
Not to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
More people need to try and use FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, for those who haven't tried it, it's quite an excellent full-featured Unix, with everything you'd find under Linux. In fact, it's fully binary compatible with Linux.
The only difference is that it does things the old way -- vi is vi, not vim, and you get sh, csh or tcsh instead of bloated bash. It doesn't have anyone pushing for "ease of use," though it's about at the level of slackware, except with ports, the greatest package management system known to man. Gentoo's portage doesn't even come close to the flexibility and reliability of ports.
Internally, it runs great, because it's not doing things the kernel shouldn't do to boost benchmarks. It's not deeply involved in corporate America, but remains strong due to good management.
Plus it's far more secure. With how much Linux websites are hacked these days -- see http://zone-h.org/ [zone-h.org] and check out the statistics section, at least 70-80% of website hacks are Linux based -- I wouldn't run it on Linux. FreeBSD is the obvious choice, as it runs its services flawlessly.
Re:More people need to try and use FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
As for linux websites being hacked, that's because they're not updated. If you fall behind on your FreeBSD updates, you'll get rooted too. Usually it's not a kernel hack, it's an application hack that would probably happen to FreeBSD too.
Re:Reliability of ports? (Score:5, Interesting)
If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?
Parent
I agree (Score:5, Interesting)
I also heard that Windows used or at least used some BSD work in it's internet capability push years ago. One question will always dog me: Why aren't the BSD's as popular with their very good license at least in the eyes of the IBMs and HPs?
Requiem for the FUD (Score:5, Informative)
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004) [internetnews.com]
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004) [netcraft.com]
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004) [slashdot.org]
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004) [slashdot.org]
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004) [netbsd.org]
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004) [eweek.com]
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004) [newsforge.com]
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;) [keltia.net]
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004) [mi2g.com]
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
To be fair, 5.x has been botched (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the development is getting very political, this also scares off people.
Re:To be fair, 5.x has been botched (Score:3, Insightful)
It is?
Ok, I can't say that I'm the most politically savvy of people, so maybe there's a lot of politics which has whooshed over my head, but... jeez, I had no idea.
It's a sad day when a FreeBSD committer learns something about the internals of the FreeBSD project from slashdot.
Re:To be fair, 5.x has been botched (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, there have apparently been a lot of very difficult problems with SMP in 5.x. But why is that an issue that we should be concerned about as users? Personally, I don't use SMP, and 5.3 has worked great for me as a desktop system. If 5.x doesn't work for you, keep runni
Don't focus on microbenchmarks. (Score:3, Informative)
Getting defensive? (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience with FreeBSD is that the 4.x branch is rock-solid stable, fast, and everything works as it's supposed to.
NetBSD has basically reached that level of quality, with better performance.
FreeBSD 5.x has been unstable for me at best. While the userland programs are pretty much the same, the kernel-level changes have killed reliability. Furthermore, some of the much-touted new features simply do not work yet. I'm sure the SMP performance is much better, but I don't have many SMP machines. I've had problems with hard lockups, just doing things like trying to combine vlan and pf. The bridge interface, afaik, also, still doesn't work with pf.
As far as packages go, ports has more packages, true. Still, rarely has there been something not in pkgsrc that I absolutely needed. Pkgsrc is also much easier to work with, and far more friendly when it comes time to upgrade things. Portupgrade is an abortion, especially compared to even *gack* portage from ricerloonix.
There are reasons there's a buzz around NetBSD these days -- and reasons FreeBSD isn't getting the love it used to. I don't know whether the FreeBSD developers bit off more than they can chew, or if they just are rushing things out the door. But until they get their act together and put out a 5.x-RELEASE that truly is release-quality (by which I mean, all the features *work*, and the drivers are supported the same way), I'm going to be using NetBSD and advising my friends to do the same.
just to be clear (Score:5, Interesting)
A one time try is all that's needed for success (Score:5, Interesting)
I downloaded a minimal boot CD, burned in, booted installed the base system over FTP and then X, KDE etc via ports...
After only a few hours I was totally confused. Everything just worked!! Well, almost everything. I had some problems with the soundcard, that was solved thanks to great documentation pointing me to a very logical solution.
I'm still a bit lightheaded. An operating system just can't be this good, I'm probably going to wake up soon.
Coincidentily (Score:3, Informative)
I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.
Have a look [bacarella.com] if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).
Innovative death cycle (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Does FreeBSD really need to prove itself? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because NetBSD has fewer users doesn't mean its criticisms are without consequence. After all, by that logic FreeBSD's criticisms of Linux would also be without consequence.
Parent
indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
I use three OSs, debian GNU/linux , freeBSD and Mac OS X.. and i think all three are as healthy as ever
im not sure on the whole of apples market share I think about 5% , but considering that OS X has its roots firmly in BSD from its NeXT heritage not to mention the programs it has from the FreeBSD project, then its safe to say that BSD is more alive than ever