Linux vs BSD (Please no flame war)

swinchen

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 15, 2004
Messages
93
I have been using Slackware for a whole now and as far the linux distro's go I LOVE it. But I have been reading a lot about FreeBSD and it sounds very interesting. I was wondering if you folks who are more informed on this topic could feed me a little information on BSD and Linux. For example: Can FreeBSD compile the majority of linux source programs without modification? Is compatibility an issue you have to deal with constantly? How is performance compared to linux?

It is somewhat scary jumping from Linux to a BSD type operating system because tghe *NIX world seems to revolve around linux. I just love the fact how things seem more integrated with BSD.

Thanks for any input you might have.
 
This is the way I look at it, BSD is what happens when you get a bunch of UNIX hackers together to write an OS for PC hardware, Linux is what you get when you get a bunch of PC hackers together to write a UNIX.

Even Alan Cox, one of the preeminent Linux kernel hackers has given kudos to OpenBSD for their software writing methodology. BSD invented TCP/IP, most UNIX programs out there have their roots in BSD software. Linux is the star quarterback of the football team, BSD is the rock solid linebacker who never gets any mention in the papers.

With that gentle bit of evangelism out of the way, FreeBSD is what I use, it's never let me down. It does almost everything that Linux does, and what it does it usually does better than Linux. Gentoo is pretty much a Linux that tries to emulate the way BSD installs and manages software. Slackware uses BSD style init scripts, which I find are so much simpler and straightforward than sysvr4 scripting.

Give FreeBSD a try, you'll probably like it alot, coming from Slack.
 
If you can surf the web without Flash, chances are good that you don't need Linux...







Oh yeah, compatibility. Almost forgot.
 
Tomahawk said:
If you can surf the web without Flash, chances are good that you don't need Linux...







Oh yeah, compatibility. Almost forgot.

I never have a problem with Flash on FreeBSD, what are you talking about?
 
Clockwork said:
I never have a problem with Flash on FreeBSD, what are you talking about?

Me either, but it usually involves using the Linux version of Flash.

XOR != OR said:
My guess is trying to start a flame fest. ie: troll.

Yeah, that's it.

Are you gonna contribute an answer, or are you just gonna pop in to crap on others?
 
I'm a FreeBSD user...Have been for quite a long time now. I started with FreeBSD-3.4 and have been using it as my primary "free *nix" ever since.

Let's start with your questions...

FreeBSD can compile just about all of the applications written for Linux out there. However, 99% of the time the applications you want are already in the FreeBSD ports system, which is a "skeleton tree" of applications and any changes needed to make them build and run under FreeBSD. You want Firefox? It's just a "cd /usr/ports/www/firefox && make install clean" away. The build is done from source and any patches that are applied to make it build are generally just there to get it to build and nothing more. Most config files are the "box-stock" configs instead of the hacked-up configs Red Hat and some other distros seem to use by default. The ports-system source builds will check any dependancies needed and build/install them for you, etc. Once a port is installed you can remove it easily, update it (using portupgrade), etc. ports really are an elegant system.

If it's not in the ports tree, generally it can be built with minimal effort.

What compatibility issues? I've never really noticed any. Sometimes driver support lags behind Linux on some end-user hardware a bit, but generally unless you're running bleeding-edge hardware you won't notice it.

Performance? On par with Linux. People are going to rant and rave about SMP performance being poor, etc. You won't notice it unless you're running lots of high-demand processes at once, etc. I've never had performance complaints about FreeBSD and FreeBSD-5 is getting even better.

FreeBSD is a complete operating system, not just a bunch of different groups using a common kernel with their own idea of what should be in the rest of the system. FreeBSD has consistency, organization and a good "design philosophy" that's inherent throughout the OS.

I keep posting this link, but I'm going to post it again...I wrote a webpage a while ago laying out why I like FreeBSD. There's some useful FreeBSD-related links on the page, including a few links to things I've written to detail some things I've learned over the years that I regularly hear questions about. More coming soon...

Flash on FreeBSD? Seems to be working for me...Maybe I should add a note about it on one of the pages...Sure, you use the Linux flash plugin, but that's what happens when it's binary-only.
 
I have 'tinkerd' with Free and Open BSD, both are nice, and the ports system was a great Idea. I would say try it out, thats the best way to figure out if you like it, but don't just go one week and then judge, give it some time so you can actually give it a fair comparison.
 
[H]EMI_426 said:
Most config files are the "box-stock" configs instead of the hacked-up configs Red Hat and some other distros seem to use by default.

FreeBSD is a complete operating system, not just a bunch of different groups using a common kernel with their own idea of what should be in the rest of the system. FreeBSD has consistency, organization and a good "design philosophy" that's inherent throughout the OS.

These two points are some of the reasons I really didn't have much luck with linux at first. I hated how redhat had a special tool for everything you wanted to do, and in the end it just made life a lot more complicated because it would always overwrite your config files, or crash, etc... it just never worked right. I think in some aspects Mandrake is even worse.

The 2nd argument for BSD is very strong indeed. Every linux distro is implemented differently. Even the directory structure and location of programs can vary wildly from distro to distro. And this is probably the biggest reason that I will give BSD a shot. Slackware seemed the most logical of all the linux distros. I really liked the system scripts much better.

Now Gentoo was interesting. I could emerge all the applications and that was kind of neat at first but then I realized I wasn't really learning linux... I was learning one very specific set of tools for linux. Also I noticed that all sorts of gentoo patches were being applied to software before the build... I just didnt have a sense of what was going on. If you are going through the trouble to have a ports system why not just go BSD?
 
swinchen said:
Now Gentoo was interesting. I could emerge all the applications and that was kind of neat at first but then I realized I wasn't really learning linux... I was learning one very specific set of tools for linux. Also I noticed that all sorts of gentoo patches were being applied to software before the build... I just didnt have a sense of what was going on. If you are going through the trouble to have a ports system why not just go BSD?

The only linux I've seriously considered lately is gentoo, because I'd like to have hardware-openGL for my radeon card in a nonwindows, and portage seems like an ok substitute for the ports tree. So far I've ended up using windows for games and living without accelerated GL screensavers in KDE. :D
 
Although my preference is BSD, then commercial Unix, then Linux,
I will admit that for the vast majority of uses, the choice
of Linux or BSD is a matter of taste. There are technical
differences, but they're subtle. The question is which style
of configuration & administration do you prefer.
With the exception of security: using anything other than
OpenBSD for a firewall is insane.
 
Another fan of FreeBSD here.

I've been running with FreeBSD since 4.3 and prefer it to the various Linux distributions that are available.

I've found that the FreeBSD documentaiton found in the FreeBSD Handbook available from www.freebsd.org to be one of the best sources of documentation.

The ports tree is awesome. If you checkout the Gentoo site you will see that Gentoo ports tree is based upon the FreeBSD ports tree. It's good stuff.

Hardware support for FreeBSD can be a bummer compared to Linux. Video card support isn't as good as Linux. nVidia has recently updated the drivers for FreeBSD and that helps but it's still not quite the same. The ATI support for OpenGL lags way behind Linux under FreeBSD.

If you have a spare machine, download the mini-ISO and open up the FreeBSD Handbook online and give it a try. Might take a couple of times to get it all together but once you do you'll find that FreeBSD is pretty good stuff.
 
The biggest difference between FreeBSD and Linux that you're going to notice at the user level is that FreeBSD uses BSD userland tools and Linux is going to use the GNU toolset; most all the other software you'll run on one is going to run on the other. Having grown up using Linux (10+yr), I feel much more comfortable with the GNU tools - the BSD ones feel somewhat dated.

The specifics of the system internals & performance in general isn't really worth mentioning; you're probably never going to notice it. There are some differences in hardware but, throught the magic of Open Source, these things equalize pretty quickly.

BSD systems are going to be slightly less user-friendly to administer; for a workstation, this isn't much of a deal - you set it up once & it should just keep going without any configuration (as long as you can keep your hands off things).

The real differences between the two come down to philosophical/ideological/aesthetic differences; I'd rather not comment on them. Personally, I think it's just a waste of time that creates the illusion of control, building from source if you've got a package system doing everything for you.
 
ameoba said:
The biggest difference between FreeBSD and Linux that you're going to notice at the user level is that FreeBSD uses BSD userland tools and Linux is going to use the GNU toolset; most all the other software you'll run on one is going to run on the other. Having grown up using Linux (10+yr), I feel much more comfortable with the GNU tools - the BSD ones feel somewhat dated.

The specifics of the system internals & performance in general isn't really worth mentioning; you're probably never going to notice it. There are some differences in hardware but, throught the magic of Open Source, these things equalize pretty quickly.

BSD systems are going to be slightly less user-friendly to administer; for a workstation, this isn't much of a deal - you set it up once & it should just keep going without any configuration (as long as you can keep your hands off things).

The real differences between the two come down to philosophical/ideological/aesthetic differences; I'd rather not comment on them. Personally, I think it's just a waste of time that creates the illusion of control, building from source if you've got a package system doing everything for you.


The feel of the tools is such a subjective thing I'll let it lie (suffice to say I prefer the BSD userland), and I'll have to agree on the performance. I personally think the FreeBSD way (of administration) is easier than many distro-specific tools I've seen, but I'm sure that's because I'm used to it. Matter of taste, again.

The point I was trying to make, however: The ports tree is just a way of organizing software. It doesn't care if you compile it or install the packages (hell, the packages are built from ports), and there's packages for most things. You don't have to compile anything to have a functional FreeBSD system, it has just been made so easy that ... why not?
In short, you have got a package system doing everything for you. It just happens to also contain compiling from source.
 
I run a few different servers, and although I find that FreeBSD has better server performance and security, I find that keeping it up to date is a major pain. Having to do a make world etc is very bad thing for production servers.

Debian's maintainability is by far the best, allowing me to upgrade my server with precompiled binaries in 1 easy command.
 
mindwarp said:
I run a few different servers, and although I find that FreeBSD has better server performance and security, I find that keeping it up to date is a major pain. Having to do a make world etc is very bad thing for production servers.

Debian's maintainability is by far the best, allowing me to upgrade my server with precompiled binaries in 1 easy command.
...So don't do a make buildworld on each server? :rolleyes: Have one machine set up to do buildworlds and then just export /usr/obj by NFS? You can build kernels that way, etc. The only things you end up running on the production machine is installkernel, installworld, mergemaster and reboot. There's even ways to build different worlds based on different make.conf files, put the target worlds in different locations, etc. You're faulting the OS' upgrade system for something you haven't bothered to look in to ways around with the OS.

There's also a freebsd-update port, which does binary updates. Never tried it, but it may work better for you.
 
[H]EMI_426 said:
[...]

FreeBSD can compile just about all of the applications written for Linux out there. However, 99% of the time the applications you want are already in the FreeBSD ports system, which is a "skeleton tree" of applications and any changes needed to make them build and run under FreeBSD. You want Firefox? It's just a "cd /usr/ports/www/firefox && make install clean" away. The build is done from source and any patches that are applied to make it build are generally just there to get it to build and nothing more. Most config files are the "box-stock" configs instead of the hacked-up configs Red Hat and some other distros seem to use by default.

Yeah, that is annoying, isn't it! I also hate that, for example, I can't remove 'sox' because gnome depends on it? I don't know about you, but I dont think Gnome really *needs* sox to run, unless of course, as you say, RedHat has played around with the deps... grr!!
 
mindwarp said:
I run a few different servers, and although I find that FreeBSD has better server performance and security, I find that keeping it up to date is a major pain. Having to do a make world etc is very bad thing for production servers.

Debian's maintainability is by far the best, allowing me to upgrade my server with precompiled binaries in 1 easy command.

That's pretty much the only reason I continue to use RedHat. :D
 
Josh_B said:
Yeah, that is annoying, isn't it! I also hate that, for example, I can't remove 'sox' because gnome depends on it? I don't know about you, but I dont think Gnome really *needs* sox to run, unless of course, as you say, RedHat has played around with the deps... grr!!
USE="-sox" emerge [whatever]

Anywho.
I like BSD, and it's style of admin, but I continue to use Gentoo. Like others I much prefer the GUNtools. It's just a personal preference.
I use Gentoo. I very much like portage, it stays bleeding-edge, and it's easy to use.
I also like Gentoo for the configuration side of things. Yes Gentoo patches are applied, but for the most part they are all to put configuration files in /etc(where belong IMHO). I hate working on a distro that I first have to find out where a config file is before I can edit it. I never liked the link spaghetti in Linux, but that seems to be making a little progress. Griping about the directory structure is silly. If you've seen one *NIX you've seen most, and should be able to figure it out without too much hassle. My content-filter/fire-wall continues to be BSD. It just runs. My file-server is a linux box. It serves up the same directories via NFS, Netatalk, Samba, and FTP. It also serves as a print server for everything from HP-UX10, to solaris 9, to MacOS 7.5 to WindowsXP. It's mirrored to another site, and backed up via tapes. My email server is a Gentoo box running an an eMac. POP3, SMTP, IMAP, webmail, virus/spam filtering, and LDAP address-book. Backs up the db, important configs, and important user's mailboxes to a DVDRW every night.
 
Just browsing around, and I spotted this remark:

Clockwork said:
This is the way I look at it, BSD is what happens when you get a bunch of UNIX hackers together to write an OS for PC hardware, Linux is what you get when you get a bunch of PC hackers together to write a UNIX.

Wow. I think that's the most succinct explanation of the difference in idealogy I've ever seen (perhaps the least succinct being the famous "Cathedral and the Bazaar" document :) ). I think I'll borrow it if I may!

Chris.
 
Back
Top