Re: [tlug] BSD vs BSD vs Linux

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Friday 09 May 2003 11:53, patrick.niessen@example.com wrote:

> which one is better, Linux or BSD?

Slow day on TLUG so let's start a flame war? ;-)

The question is, of course, too broad to answer.  The
first response, if you get anything other than a "Tastes Great!
Less Filling!" level of discussion would be "Better for what?"
A lot of people might tell you that some BSD version is better for
servers because of its high stability.  Others might say that
Debian is in the same stability league as BSD.  My own experience,
having used both FreeBSD and various Linux distros, is that both
are pretty stable.  My personal uptime record was held by a Solaris
x86 box that went almost 1300 days and was brought down only by
a catastrophic hardware failure.  If the white smoke hadn't escaped
from the power supply, who knows how much longer it would have kept
going?

"Better for who?" is another question.  For an end-user transitioning from
Windows, with or without supervision, BSD is going in at the deep end.
My first exposure to *nix, before I became a Linux user, was FreeBSD
w/out X.  Two of my greatest needs at the time were to read and input
Japanese and to be able to exchange MS Word documents with other
people in that company.  It wasn't pleasant, I can tell you :-)  My eventual
solution was  dual-booting Windows and TurboLinux .

"Better for what hardware?" comes to mind, too.  Most Linux distros are
for Intel/compatible hardware only.  Some cover Intel & PPC.  Some,
such as Yellow Dog, are PPC only.  Debian covers a wide range of
archtectures, and NetBSD probably runs on more architectures than any
OS in the world.  There are probably niche Linux distros for nearly every
architecture, but if you want to stay with something mainstream on niche
hardware, the choices are pretty much NetBSD or Debian (somebody correct
me if there is anything else).

> I also heard there are two version of BSD, free and net.  Which is the
> recommended one?

There are at least four: Free, Net, Open, Tiny (don't really know anything
about that last one; I've just heard of it).  I wouldn't be surprised to learn 
of more.

FreeBSD was historically x86-centered and I think is still mostly thus,
but it also runs now on IA-64, Alpha, PC-98, and UltraSPARC.

NetBSD runs on practically anything.  The list is here: 
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/  The list is long :-)
If you have hardware that isn't supported by any Linux distro,
NetBSD is your friend.

OpenBSD runs on x86, PA-RISC, Alpha, M68K, PPC, SPARC,
UltraSPARC, and a few others.  It arose when Theo De Raadt was
kicked off of the NetBSD team. OpenBSD's focus is on security,
and generally it is quite good.  They lost a lot of political capital
among sysadmins in the brouhaha  over last year's OpenSSH exploit
and the recommended solution (more or less "you must upgrade, not just
turn on privsep") that was recommended.  Some people chucked OpenSSH
over that and bought SSH.

> Why do Linuxers switch to BSD, and do they come back?

One person I know switched in large part because of the development model
surrounding the kernel.  There were, quite frankly, a number of things in the
development of the 2.4 kernel that were pretty fouled up.  I know people who
still use 2.2 kernels on high-load production servers because they consider
them more stable.  While I haven't had any problems with 2.4 myself, I do
agree with them on the stability point.

Many of the organizational problems that contributed to the 2.4 mess have
(at least mostly) been sorted out and 2.6 will likely not see the sorts of
troubles that 2.4 saw.   This provides a partial answer the the "Which
is better?" question: if your number one priority is rock-solid stability
and downtime is just not acceptable, FreeBSD on Intel is probably your
best bet.  It would be hard to beat or match, although Debian might well
be up to the task. Debian is an excellent choice for server use because
they are very conservative about what goes into Debian Stable, and the
release times between Stable versions are in the 1 - 2 year range.  I've
heard they may up the tempo to doing a stable release once a year, but
that's still, I believe, the most conservative release schedule of any distro.
Besides stability, Debian also seeks to cover as many hardware platforms
as they can (http://www.debian.org/ports/) and keep those platform releases
all in sync.

I migrated from RH to Debian not long ago, and while there is some
work involved in the conversion, it was worth it.  Debian is terrifically
stable, and getting KDE 3.1 on Debian Stable (which ships with KDE 2.2
- I told you they were conservative) was as easy as adding a line
for KDE's ftp site to my /etc/apt/sources.list and doing apt-get update;
apt-get install.

I don't know many people who have dropped Linux entirely for BSD
(one at least; maybe two).  That one has not, AFAIK, come back.
Most people switch out of curiosity, or preference for BSD-style
init scripts (many of them came from BSD backgrounds anyway)
- and I must say that BSD-style is more clear and straightforward than
SysV-style, or just to learn something new, or to run an OS that is
less mainstream than Linux has become.

What most Linux users who start using BSD probably do is to run
both, in different places and for different reasons.  I'm not running
BSD anywhere right now, but would certainly consider it for
server applications, or might even run it on a workstation if I had any
spare computers sitting around.

Jonathan
-- 
Jonathan Q
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