[geeks] A Real OS? (was: Re: my capitalization.. etc.)

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 18 May 2002, Eric Dittman wrote:

Okay, I'll bite...

> I'm sure you'll find that IBM, Sun, HPaq (and Digital and Compaq
> before they were swallowed) knew about *BSD.

Which is probably why their commercial OSes (except for Tru64, from 
what I've heard) contain so much BSD code.  I'd bet you that they wouldn't
use Linux code even if it weren't GPVed.  Try reading the Linux source
code some time.  There are portions of it that make you feel like it was
deliberately obfuscated.

Remember that Sun used to -ship- a BSD derivative and that at least one of
Sun's founders -created- BSD, back when BSD was just a set of userland
utilities.

> I think what hurts *BSD most is the fragmentation.

Only if you think that more than one BSD is too many.  They each have
their focus areas.  I kind-of like that.

Contrast this to the Linux distributions, where you basically have
Slackware which tries to be BSD, Debian which tries to be Stallman's fan
club, RedHat (I still haven't figured out their angle), and an uncountable
number of "it's like RedHat but with a different $feature $characteristic"
distributions.

Yes, the kernel is unfragmented (except for the non-Linus patch
collections), but that doesn't amount to anything if the environment's
different everywhere.  And the LSB doesn't address issues like RPM vs DEB
vs TGZ and init schemes and lots of other administration topics.

> The long-time lack of a decent installer probably hurt, too, along
> with the kernel rebuild being like playing a text adventure game.

cd /usr/src/sys/arch/conf/$arch
vi $hostname
config $hostname
cd ../compile/$hostname
make depend all install

That's so bad?  Linux is:

cd /usr/src/sys/linux
make config (or menuconfig or xconfig)
gmake depend clean bzlilo modules modules_install

Provided that everything's properly documented, I'd rather edit a textfile
than deal with menuconfig, which hates most of the terminals I use.  "make
config" is okay if you don't mind playing twenty (thousand) questions.
Lately, I've been using xconfig, primarily because menuconfig doesn't like
iris-ansi-net, even with the proper terminfo files.

I'm with alex on this one.  The Linux hype is all about flavor-of-the-
week.  Linux is good stuff, and I used to use it on everything, but
OpenBSD and NetBSD are just so much more polished.  If the BSDs got some
of Linux's dynamic module tricks, it'd absolutely be no contest--right now
that's the only thing Linux has ahead of BSD.

Well, that and the widespread name-recognition.  It's almost like
companies are taking Linus seriously in his response to "Other than the
fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I should use Linux
over BSD?"  Or, uhm, was he serious?

--Jonathan