Re: [tlug] Gnome vs. KDE? BSD vs. Linux?

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

Niels Kobschaetzki writes:

 > not much of a fan of gentoo personally - if I would go for Linux, I
 > think I'll use Ubuntu. I have some experiences with that distribution
 > and I know that the ppl around me are all using it on their desktops

Well, you know your resources, but Ubuntu is likely to be pretty heavy
as distros go.  They're really big into the eye candy (which is a big
fat minus in my book), and into internationalization (which is a big
ol' plus basically, but if they distribute *all* the message catalogs
with each package you're talking a lot of YAGNI).  Both are heavy in
terms of disk space, though.

With BSD you generally won't get very much of that, unless you ask for
it.  (Maybe with FreeBSD, I dunno.)

 > Actually I'm more interested what the differences for the end-user are
 > between Linux and BSD, not what the most BSD-like distribution is. I
 > know that BSD is nice on servers with stuff like jails and ZFS is
 > quite cool but those are not really things I care for on a laptop.

Linux at this point in time probably has better driver coverage,
although I don't know if it has better driver support (especially
since a lot of that coverage comes via closed-source drivers).  This
may not affect you, since you have a somewhat older laptop, I guess.

As already pointed out, Linux command utilities are bloated with all
kinds of options that really don't belong there.  That won't affect
you too much, as things like ls and cp mostly are Linuxward
compatible.[1]  I think the utilities that I've had the most trouble
with are cp,[2] ls, and ps, in that order.  The system version of GCC
is probably a lot more recent, and of course you'll be using GNU make
rather than BSD's make.  This last is annoying since gmake is to make
as bash is to sh: a minefield of creeping YAGNIs.  You'll also have to
get used to a very different project organization, based on
autoconfusion rather than on Makefile includes.

As has been remarked several times, BSD documents are much better.
Ulrich Drepper may be one of the best writers in FLOSS, but I doubt he
ever touches the man pages or info manuals for glibc.

Startup conventions are rather different, as has been mentioned.  This
mostly only matters for new development.  It's not that hard to get
used to controlling daemons with "/etc/init.d/<daemon> <command>".

The global directory tree is somewhat different, as GNU-based systems
like Linux tend to follow FHS, but I don't think the BSDs have too
much truck with that.  As usual, locate(1) is your friend.

The standard desktops (GNOME and KDE) are *very* heavy.  I've never
tried KDE since (no thanks to RMS) XEmacs doesn't support Qt.  GNOME
is one of those "run away! run away!" horrors to a BSD kinda guy:
bloated with all kinds of capabilities that are over-elaborated and
ever-changing (absence/presence of GNOME support is one reason why I
can untar an XEmacs from 2001, suppress the autodetection of Berkeley
DB, and build a working XEmacs with X windows, image, audio, and
curses support, while Attila Kinali says "yeah right, just try to
build software from 10 years ago").  It also hides all the
configuration in a Windows-like registry (implementation is quite
different, but the general concept that conffiles are not for the
user's eyes, let alone fingers, is similar).  Up until a couple of
years ago the consensus of those whose minds were not disabled by
political brainrot was that KDE was better integrated and better at
staying out of the way when you didn't want it.  I'm not sure what the
general opinion is today, though.

There is xubuntu, but I don't know whether it really offers the Ubuntu
experience.

Linux tends to put more stuff in kernel space than BSD does, but this
normally shouldn't affect the user, not even for reboots, because of
the heavier use of kernel modules.  From a user's perspective a kernel
module just looks like a daemon invoked by a special command.

I can't think of anything else I've noticed.  It used to be claimed
that Linux was more user-oriented and BSD more server-oriented, but
Mac OS X puts "paid" to that bill.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Can't say "upward" except in the sense where brain damage is not
so severe as to remove the ability to stand the brain damage will be
carried above the rest of the body.

[2]  cp is a real PITA since it makes writing portable "install"
targets in Makefiles difficult.  You may actually care about this if
you end up using your Linux laptop for BSD hacking.