Re: [tlug] BSD vs BSD vs Linux

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Saturday 10 May 2003 08:16, bruno raoult wrote:

> I love Unix too, more than I dislike M$. And my favourite Unix would -
> as of today - be Solaris. Unix does not mean free!

The first thing you need to do to a Solaris system is make it
behave as much like Linux as possible.  Happily, Sun ships
GNU tools on CD now :-)

My take on Solaris is use it if:

1) You need high-end Sun hardware;
2) You're just drawn by the big money that experienced 
    Solaris admins can make.

Otherwise, go with Linux or BSD :-)

> Linux too, BSDxxx too... Most of *Unix* admins do not like M$ operating
> systems - in fact the M$ admin point-and-click interface rather of the
> OS itself."
> Replace the fucking binary -including registry- conf files by ascii
> ones, give a good telnet, remove the "X: drive" system, and Unix admins
> will mostly feel happy with NT.

Let me go one a few more: replace the crappy CLI tools with some good
ones.  NT/2K/XP et al's CLI tools are totally lame.  GNU tools would be
very helpful, or workalikes for them.  Fix crap like having to reboot for
trivial things.  These are supposed to be advanced OSes, for crying out
loud.  Even on W2K server, you sometimes have to reboot just because of
a software install.  On any *nix system, the only software install that needs
a reboot is the kernel, and even then you only have to reboot when you
start *using* that kernel, not just because you installed the package.  

Get a better boot loader.
Make it able to run CLI only with no GUI at all.
Get rid of the crappy error codes which are so commonly
not even documented within the system at all.

I'm sure I could think of more.

The trouble is, by the time you've done all this, you've nearly
turned Windows into *nix.  That being the case, you might as well
just keep using the *nix of your choice, since it has all those things
*now*.  It's far easier to add what is lacking for some Windows admins
and users to *nix than it is to fix all of the things that are wrong with
Windows.  I used to be a Windows user, and even liked MS (the
shame, the shame!) and found Linux to be incredibly hard at first.
This was in '97, when Linux actually was kind of hard, not like now.
But after I learned it, I got to like it better and better, and like Windows
less and less, to the point where I eventually dropped Windows entirely
and now dislike both it (for technical reasons) and its producer (for
both technical and ethical ones).  What I ultimately found from my
move to Linux is that the *nix was is just a better way.  When MS
developed Windows, they failed to draw upon any of the lessons from
the many successful years of UNIX, even though they were themselves
an x86 UNIX vendor at one time.

If MS had based NT on Xenix, how different would the world be today? :-)

Jonathan
-- 
Jonathan Q
GPG key ID: ACC46EF9 (E52E 8153 8F37 74AF C04D  0714 364F 540E ACC4 6EF9)
To get my public key: gpg --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.mit.edu ACC46EF9

Attachment: pgp00040.pgp
Description: signature