Decent article and, even if it is a little dated, the core message is still relevant.
Loved this quote, which oddly enough I’d never encountered in my 20+ years of using *BSD:
BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.
Particularly relevant in the era of systemd et al. Hmm, it’s just reminded me of reading Bill and Lynne Jolitz’s 386BSD articles in DDJ when I was a schoolkid and trying to make head or tail of them.
“BSD is for people who love Unix. Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.” is a relevant quote, supposedly attributed to Theo de Raadt, but I can’t seem to find any source.
Gentoo is nice, I guess, but to me it doesn’t feel like BSD at all. As a user I see GNU utils, man pages lacking quality, no SIGINFO and not much coherence. As a sysadmin I see a Linux boot sequence, from bootloader to init scripts, and other management utils, such as partitioning tools. As a programmer I see glibc.
Look at Portage and not just at how “recipes” are no longer makefiles, but shell scripts. Look at all the extra functionality compared to *BSD ports: https://projects.gentoo.org/pms/6/pms.html
I used Gentoo for two years in 2014-2015 and liked it, and I may use it again soon. But it’s just not s BSD system, and BSD is not only (or even primarily) about ports.
The BSDs have a slower pace of development, it’s true. However I find that less stuff in the base system is obviously broken – it either works or does not. And it’s well-documented to boot!
That looks super cool. I really want it. But… baytrail. -_- more like betrayal, of me, by my past self, by buying FreeBSD unsupported hardware for dirt cheap.
Tempted to try… can one set up a live usb thing like I recall I could do with Ubuntu where you kinda get to try the system before you install? I’m very much enticed by the idea of a freebsd system, and I have yet to fully tweak this instance of Linux. Maybe a huge backup if I know it works, but that’s all.
I use OpenBSD so I’m not as sure about FreeBSD. You could run the installer from one USB stick and install to a second USB stick. OpenBSD doesn’t have a live CD with a desktop to my knowledge, but it was easy to install X using the installer, and get XFCE binary packages after booting the new system.
FWIW, many Linux distributions struggled with Bay Trail support as a lot (all?) of the systems had 32-bit EFI even though the CPU is 64-bit, making installation of a 64-bit OS tricky (the Linux assumption was 64-bit system has 64-bit EFI).
Old but good. Archive.org has a copy from 2010, should we add a date to the title?
It’s a lot older than that. Talking about FreeBSD 4.9…
http://mailing.freebsd.advocacy.narkive.com/8HUxTzTY/freebsd-for-linux-users includes discussion about it from 2004.
This was #1 on my feedback list, too. :-)
Decent article and, even if it is a little dated, the core message is still relevant.
Loved this quote, which oddly enough I’d never encountered in my 20+ years of using *BSD:
Particularly relevant in the era of systemd et al. Hmm, it’s just reminded me of reading Bill and Lynne Jolitz’s 386BSD articles in DDJ when I was a schoolkid and trying to make head or tail of them.
“BSD is for people who love Unix. Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.” is a relevant quote, supposedly attributed to Theo de Raadt, but I can’t seem to find any source.
A quick web search finds the quote as I remember it (“Linux is for people who hate Windows. BSD is for people who love Unix.”), unattributed.
The quote from deraadt@ is “Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix” from this article.
Is it really? Gentoo Linux evolved in a better *BSD replacement under all aspects.
Gentoo is nice, I guess, but to me it doesn’t feel like BSD at all. As a user I see GNU utils, man pages lacking quality, no
SIGINFOand not much coherence. As a sysadmin I see a Linux boot sequence, from bootloader to init scripts, and other management utils, such as partitioning tools. As a programmer I see glibc.Look at Portage and not just at how “recipes” are no longer makefiles, but shell scripts. Look at all the extra functionality compared to *BSD ports: https://projects.gentoo.org/pms/6/pms.html
What extra functionality do you mean?
I used Gentoo for two years in 2014-2015 and liked it, and I may use it again soon. But it’s just not s BSD system, and BSD is not only (or even primarily) about ports.
I tried installing FreeBSD on my laptop a while ago, it was all fine and dandy until I realized I couldn’t get X to run because Baytrail. T_T
The BSDs have a slower pace of development, it’s true. However I find that less stuff in the base system is obviously broken – it either works or does not. And it’s well-documented to boot!
That looks super cool. I really want it. But… baytrail. -_- more like betrayal, of me, by my past self, by buying FreeBSD unsupported hardware for dirt cheap.
FWIW, OpenBSD has support for Bay Trail in 5.9: http://www.openbsd.org/59.html
(DRM here refers to Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Rights Management)
Tempted to try… can one set up a live usb thing like I recall I could do with Ubuntu where you kinda get to try the system before you install? I’m very much enticed by the idea of a freebsd system, and I have yet to fully tweak this instance of Linux. Maybe a huge backup if I know it works, but that’s all.
I use OpenBSD so I’m not as sure about FreeBSD. You could run the installer from one USB stick and install to a second USB stick. OpenBSD doesn’t have a live CD with a desktop to my knowledge, but it was easy to install X using the installer, and get XFCE binary packages after booting the new system.
Sooooooo two sticks, one comp. Got it.
FWIW, many Linux distributions struggled with Bay Trail support as a lot (all?) of the systems had 32-bit EFI even though the CPU is 64-bit, making installation of a 64-bit OS tricky (the Linux assumption was 64-bit system has 64-bit EFI).