I decided to play around with FreeBSD for awhile and loaded it onto Virtual PC and was surprised at how fast it is. Compared to the Red Hat Linux (same environment), FreeBSD is a speed demon. This is without even cueing up X Window, just launching the kernel and letting the processes start and providing the $ prompt. (It probably isn’t fair to compare speed under X Window circumstances because I’m running WindowMaker under FreeBSD and KDE under Linux and KDE is probably more overhead to push around). At any rate, the speed discrepancy is substantial. Linux is like swimming through hardening concrete in comparison.
I was also pleased with the nice array of ports provided on the install CD. I haven’t had time to run ‘make install’ on all the ones I want, but it’s quite a nice set of apps.
So this has me wondering: for those of you who run Linux rather than a Microsoft OS on your PCs, what is your reason for going with Linux specifically rather than another free and available Unix? Unless my experience is an anomaly, and/or other distributions are far snappier than the Red Hat variant, it looks like FreeBSD would be more responsive. Are you running commercial apps that are only available for Linux?
Hmm, I was going to post this in Great Debates at first, but I can’t really put up any substantial trash talk that I’m prepared to defend yet, so I’ll back down and do it as a poll in here.
Mandrake. Mandrake Linux is why I use Linux over a BSD. I had Unix experience, but configuring XFree86 kicked my butt at first. Mandrake was a bulletproof install for me until I learned enough to play with other distros.
By the time I got around to looking at the BSD flavors, I was a Mandrake bigot. I just couldn’t give them a fair chance.
I sympathize. Baking XFree86 and getting it configured flummoxed the hell out of me the first time around trying to get it running under MacOS X 10.1.x (back then you couldn’t simply download it from Apple, let alone install it as part of the OS install options; you had to make it from source files, and even with Fink, which automates the process, it was still less than straightforward).
But under FreeBSD, during the regular install procedure, I was asked “So, do you wanna install X11R6 along with the rest? Oh, you do, huh? Well, which WM would you prefer? We can set you up with KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, …<other options>, …or you can just subsist on TWM if you prefer”, and it did it automatically! I mean, I was expecting FreeBSD to be considerably more primitive than any other install procedure, maybe requiring me to run arcane formatting partioning slicing and defining scripts from the command line and explaining to it the interrupts and hardware addresses and whatnot of all my hardware or something. But it’s all pretty much driven by dialog and menu. Even configuring XFree86 display settings was just a matter of selecting the S3 Trio card from the set of display cards and picking the range of resolutions I’d like to be able to display, and color depth. At the conclusion of the operation: "If you wish to re-enter this utility after the system is up, you may do so by typing ‘/stand/sysinstall’.
I’m totally impressed with the user-friendliness of it.
I’ve never tried any flavor of BSD as I started using Linux (Red Hat was my first distro) in January. Since then, I’ve jumped to Mandarke and am currently using 9.1. Using KDE 3.1.0; however, I see no discernable speed difference between 'Drake and XP Pro on a Celeron 1400 with 512 megabytes of RAM. I’m even considering trashing my XP partition and throwing another Unix OS in its place. I’ll probably try BSD, but I want to grapple with Debian or Gentoo first.
AHunter3, using FreeBSD, do you find that there are packages you want that haven’t been ported yet? That was another of my concerns in trying one of the BSD flavors. I’ve heard that, sometimes, if it’s not available in portage you can import the rpm/dev/tgz package but I haven’t heard how available packages are.
I haven’t been playing with it long enough to have an answer for you yet. (Keep in mind that I’m just “moonlighting” with it. My regular OS is MacOS X but I like to try new things). I was impressed with the range of ports I could pick from to install along with the OS, but that doesn’t mean I could necessarily get anything I would ever learn to want if I used it every day.
It does have a Linux compatibility module which is supposed to let you execute Linux-x86 binaries. Depending on how well that works, that could make a substantial difference, I’d think.
I think you are mistaken. Not only is Red Hat’s Linux distros ‘freer’ then most distributions (does not include closed-source software), with Fedora they’ve opened their development process a lot more.
The debate right now centers more around the hole Fedora left in the lower-end supported Linux in RH product line, but for home usage Fedora works great and you can consider FC1 as equivalent RHL10 (RHL9 improved).
To get back to the OP… I never gave FreeBSD a shot because as a workstation OS Linux offers me more software and community support (mailing list archives, web sites) then *BSD. I would consider *BSD if I had to built a security related product.
I doubt however that you get the same amount of functionnalities from the *BSD OS then Linux in exchange for your improved performance. If you were able to demonstrate that with some real usage benchmarks, I’d be very interested.