I think he has a point. The most important thing to take away from his
comments probably come at the end of that page where he says to look at BOTH.
Both Linux and BSD are good. I'm running both.
As background, the OSes currently powered up and runing on my home hobby LAN
are:
Win95
Win98
WinME
Win2K Server
Linux (Mandrake 8.1) - two of these. One was Caldera until a week or so ago.
Linux (Slackware)
FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE
I spend most of my time on this Mandrake box. The Slackware box and one of
the Mandrake boxes are currently headless for a lack of cables for my KVM
switch. (It's actually just a KV, very old, mice litter my desk, but Xmas is
coming.) One of the projects I'm considering is to build a NetBSD box and
run iptables to make a third firewall. (I get three IP addys from
RoadRunner.)
Though I like BSD and I intend to look into it more, as well as learning more
about Linux, there are some things to keep in mind. People coming from
Windows to Linux are usually facing a steep learning curve. Recent
distributions just keep getting easier, so this is less of an issue than it
used to be, but it's still there. To me, it seems BSD has a steeper learning
curve than Linux. Also, Linux seems to be better "supported" than BSD. It's
not that BSD is not well-documented, it is, but there are more and more
varied places to get help with and learn about Linux. If there was a BSD
users group in this area I would go to their meetings and read their local
mailing list the same as I do for our beloved SLUG, but I haven't found one.
One is supposed to be forming, but it's not here yet. The BSD documentation
project does not have the breadth of information that the Linux documentation
project does. It has a lot of stuff, and it is good stuff, but you can get
help from more different places with Linux.
Also, in his comparison below he's comparing 4.1-STABLE to the 2.2.16 kernel.
I wonder if it is much different in the 2.4.x kernels.
On Thursday 22 November 2001 12:06 pm, you wrote:
> Can anyone comment on this or verify or dispute this? (from:
> http://movingparts.thelinuxcommunity.org/systems.shtml )
>
> <snipped from page>
> First, FreeBSD does a MUCH better job of handling memory-management than
> does Linux. What does this mean? I've been running FreeBSD with
> apache/X/php4/netscape/etc. on my work machine for a month now and I still
> have half of my RAM
> free--and my swap partition is only 3% full. Now, on almost
> exactly the same machine, I have had the same services running on
> a Linux machine, and my RAM is 75% used up--but I also show having 50% of
> my swap partition used up.
>
> Second, FreeBSD seems to do a much better job of hard drive
> I/O handling. There is a noticeable difference between my laptop and my
> friend's laptop (IDENTICAL laptops, mind you) with me running FreeBSD
> 4.1-STABLE and him running Linux 2.2.16, when it comes to reading/writing
> large files, or large amounts of small files. </snipped from page>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> =====
> ________________
>
> Justin Keyes
> m9u35@yahoo.com
> ________________
>
> __________________________________________________
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