Re: [tlug] FreeBSD.....Linux what's the difference

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Micheal" == Micheal E Cooper <Micheal> writes:

    Micheal> Really? That does sound wonderful.

The ports system?  Sure.  But you can get that with Linux too, via
Debian's apt.

The idea of build everything from source so that everything is
literally working from the same page of the .h is great for
mission-critical servers.  Added to the fundamental advantages of
BSD-kei for kernel and library stability, I'd say BSD would be the
preferred way to go for a professional server admin.  (I use Linux
because I don't want to spend the time building servers from scratch;
my main server is normally my last workstation but one with all the
user apps removed.  ;-)

But build from source gets really old, really fast, when you're
dealing with complex, broken-by-user-demand workstation apps.

On a server, my reaction to a build failure is "hm, I guess I didn't
need that unstable piece of junk after all rm -rf $appsourceroot
done".  But for user stuff, it's a massive annoyance to deal with
build issues in a doc2txt app ... wouldn't you rather just put the
offending Word file aside for a day and reupdate tomorrow?  But if
you've already put in even 15 minutes on building a port, the
temptation to see if you can fix the damn build gets pretty strong.

And Linux is way, way ahead on the number of apps supported, and
typically way way more uptodate on user apps.  This is true of XEmacs,
for example, which I think is a perfect example of the kind of thing
that tends to be better on Linux.  I know most of the major Linux
distros XEmacs packagers personally; I'd have to look in the port
READMEs to figure out who does them for the BSDs.  Why?  You _must_
have a text editor, but you don't absolutely _need_ an Emacs, and the
features of XEmacs vs GNU Emacs are definitely optional.  So the BSDs
usually provide a single, rather old, bare-bones port of XEmacs, while
the Linuces usually provide an array of current XEmacs, as source and
as binary packages compiled with various options.

Most of the major Linux distros also seem to provide packaged versions
of many Emacs Lisp applications as well.  In BSD you're usually on
your own there (except that for XEmacs the "SUMO" package distribution
is getting pretty comprehensive).

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
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