Tonight at the bay area freebsd user group (BAFUG) meeting there was discussion about likes / dislikes and the general differences between these two great free OS's.
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Tonight at the bay area freebsd user group (BAFUG) meeting there was discussion about likes / dislikes and the general differences between these two great free OS's.
To begin with, there were no flames. It was a very intellectual talk. I was pleased.
On the BSd side of things:
On the Linux side:
A very deep talk, many bsd kernel hackers were present, with everyone's favorite Rick Moen standing for Linux. A good time was had.
Message I would like to give is simple: a free, open OS is the key, not which one. Preferably unix like, but that is just me. Whether it be a bsd or linux flavor is not important. When we say linux, often we really mean "free OS" and all of us should make a concerted effort at this.
p.s. happy birthday Rick
It is nice to see an article like this. Not one sided, not flamebait, not immature. Good work.
I really hate to be AOL:ing, but I couldn't agree with you more, Shaleh. It's especially good to see Debian people being open minded. Kudos to you!
It's nice to know that even in the ongoing religious wars, there are still reasonable people on both sides ;) I still believe that most reasonable people recognize that there is no `one size fits all` open-source OS. We need more discussion on which areas are most appropriate for which OS, and (please don't flame, my teflon-kevlar vest is out being cleaned ;) the discussion really should include all OSes (BSD, Linux, BeOS, Wintendo, etc) because there is a reasonable place for each, and room for a few more yet.
one consensus at the meeting was that freebsd will continue to overload itself until it gracefully dies. The growth curve is pretty flat. Linux will do well for a while, peak, and drop off. Everyone felt that you would not see the difference most of the time, only when a server is getting beat to death. Most of the time you need to reconsider the number of machines / hardware involved at this point anyway (-:
They said pcmcia did not work but so well and I said "pcmcia works pretty well" and listed the odd oops's I could cause. After a little talking we realized that pcmcia actually is fairly close on both, they just see the glass as half empty (or 50% too big for you engineers). Also, there are more dirvers for pcmcia cards in Linux. And freebsd pretty much lacks cardBus support.
FreeBSD doesn't "overload itself until it gracefully dies." In every situation I've seen, and I assume that you must be referring to denial of service, FreeBSD handles what it can and works just fine after an attack is over, not gracefully dying. Of course, services must also be coded well, which means attention is paid to low resource situations (as well as error checks are made for everything else everywhere, too). The last "gracefully [dying]" problem I've seen was running the system out of mbufs, and that is handled much better nowadays (not panicking ;).
A very deep talk, many bsd kernel hackers were present, with everyone's favorite Rick Moen standing for Linux.
Well, it was Rick's birthday and, when asked what he wanted, he specifically stated that he wanted me to ensure that the Evil Rick Moen clone(s) be barred from attendance. I was happy to help with my sweetie's birthday request of course.
_Deirdre
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