Re: Comparison of BSD vs Linux? (here goes the flame war!)

["Derek Martin-9" <user=7@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 11:30:29AM -0500, Scott Ehrlich wrote: 
> I'm in a class at Usenix/Lisa and the instructor is a BSD fan and hates 
> Linux.   

Did anyone bother to ask him why?  I'm guessing most of his reasons 
for this amount to unfamiliarity and/or uneducated prejudice. 

Linux is many things, and there are distros that target your 
particular application, whether it be security, desktop OS, server OS, 
media PC, games, etc.  There are Linux distros that are perhaps 
slightly more BSD-ish, and others that are perhaps more System V-ish. 
But above all, Linux is extremely POSIX compliant, which means that 
many things work like they do in BSD or in System V about equally well 
(examples being the ps command, which supports both flavors of 
options, several printing systems, which support command-line tools 
that emulate both printing systems, etc). 

It's hard to imagine why someone rational who likes BSD could hate 
Linux -- many of the tools available for each work exactly the same. 
As others have pointed out, Linux has more available hardware and 
software support.  Both are similarly flexible in how you can 
configure them, etc. 

One thing that's interesting to note: At one point, most of the 
surviving commercial Unix variants were based on BSD Unix, (SunOS, 
HP-UX 9, etc.) and over time became more System V-like (Solaris, HP-UX 
10, etc.).  From an administration and user environment standpoint, 
the commercial Unixen have arguably become more like Linux, and less 
like BSD.  Or perhaps Linux has become more like them... or both. 

Honestly I don't think that means anything important; it's just an 
interesting point. =8^) 

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 
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