(Ted Harding) wrote:
I have to say that the {Net|Free|...}BSD people I know are solid in their view that this family of Unixoids are the way it should be done, on essentially the grounds that you describe: BSD is BSD and that's that. You know what you're getting. These people include people who have migrated from Linux and do not want to migrate back.
I could well be another.
Another reason they like is that the update procedure is sublimely simple: go on line and execute
make world
WOW, I did not know that.
snip
However, it does seem to be true that the range of available software for Linux outstrips what's available for BSD. Though I do wonder to what extent Linux source code can be compiled on BSD -- one may need to install BSD versions of various libraries, for instance, and some libraries may depend too much on the Linux kernel to be compileable on BSD.
Most (all?) BSDs have a Linux compatibility library which means they can run many Linux binaries as is. Those are not included in the 5000 I mentioned.
Ian