[SunRescue] Objective facts and biased opinions about OS choice

[User Bobkeys BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

Generally I would agree with most everything you said.

But, you forgot Plan9 from outer space!  I have not yet fooled much with
it but it is interesting.

I did get sol8 up on a 40mb ss4 last night, so I will have to see how
well that slobbers along.  It will run in 16mb, or so the minimal install
says if you custom install.

Of all the BSD things, on older wares, I really do like 4.3BSD on the
VAX... lean, mean, classy machine.... but stuck on old tiny drives,
unless we ever get a good scsi port done.  But, the modern Free/Net/Open
BSD flavors are better for production use.

OpenBSD has been best in my hands on my lowendian servers in the office.
NetBSD and FreeBSD are about equal, close behind.  NetBSD is ported to
everything, including the kitchen toaster/sink/fridge, but it has some
port inconsistencies on some hardware that makes OpenBSD best on sparc,
FreeBSD best on I386, and NetBSD best on the rest.  Linux... well, better
than NT, and the NT crate is just a browser/mail/printer dump box for the
dept stuff.  NT crashes, guaranteed, about thrice monthly, but is mostly
idiotproof, otherwise, as long as you keep virus ditties off it, and
don't make it do anything real heavy.  Linux is ok on the desktop,
but I get real scared of its holes.  In another couple years, I think
it will be much better in that regard.

Windows is the ol' lady's and the kid's toys machines.  I prefer dos5
with a good set of unix tools (telnet/ftp/vi/troff/TeX), over windows,
because it always works, every time, anytime.

> All of that said, heres my preference.
> 
> Solaris on UltraSPARC and OpenBSD on jsut about anything else for business
> UNIX, Linux on x86 for personal UNIX, IRIX for graphics and video, WinME for
> games, and Win2K for actually workng with Windows.
> 
> Chris Byrne

Excepting my like for FreeBSD as opposed to Linux as the Personal *nix,
we pretty much agree, across the board.

Bob