cl@isbd.net wrote:
I'm very interested in this discussion, preferably without too much strong advocacy please.
I currently run Slackware which suits me well as a mostly command line driven version of Linux. I'm considering alternatives though and I wonder how the various BSDs compare. Are there any sites out there with comparisons of FreeBSD, NetBSD, maybe some Linuxes and others?
I am a slackware user too. I started in linux with the likes of redhat and suse but they have too much hand holding for my liking and debian is just so unwieldy to install. Slackware was a pleasant middle ground for me; a good range of useful packages, simple straightforward install, good documentation so I can find out how to hack most things I want at the command line.
Its downsides for me are are 2.4 kernel and an over reliance on some very general but complex scripts like hotplug which actually hinder command line configuration.
I was looking for something simpler, purer I suppose and then I read Cliff Stoll's book 'The Cuckoo's Egg' about hacking and cracking 20 years ago. He was using BSD Unix at Berkeley and something about the way it all worked struck a chord with me so I went and looked at the current BSD offerings. I was pleasantly surprised to find good hardware detection, straightforward install, zero buggering about with complex scripts, excellents docs, a single kernel source that compiles unmodified on a huge range of platforms yet still supports old processors with few resources. For me it's a learning experience and I am having great fun. It is more Unix-like than Linux but there are Unix zealots who will spedily point out that none of the BSD variants are true Unixes, so now I have downloaded Solaris (5 CDs worth) which officially is a Unix.
I am not saying the BSDs are better than Linux, just different and in some ways better for me. After all they are just tools and the best tool to use depends on the job. I still have this laptop (p4) running slack, I have a PC (1GHz Celeron) in my workshop running Windows 2000 (which is surprisingly stable) for the proprietary microcontroller development software tools I need to use, and an old K5-475 running NetBSD.
YMMV.
Ian