[geeks] The best things in the world

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Sep 13, 2008, at 13:06 , Jochen Kunz wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:36:47 -0400
> Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
>
>> NetBSD and OpenBSD are pretty clean, but FreeBSD isn't.
> IMHO: NetBSD is the cleanest implementation of The Unix Paradigm.

It's the most like the UNIX I remember starting on, but still has a  
lot of good modern features.

The main thing it lacks for my purposes is better SMP.

> [FreeBSD]
>> Starting with 5.x they abandoned reason and went on a massive
>> feature bloat just like Linux did with 2.6.
> That bad? Sad. (The last FreeBSD I saw closer was around 4. I used
> 2.2.18 for a long time.)

They really started adding a ton of features, and it was clearly too  
much too fast.  Some of the features are very nice of course, but for  
a few years I wondered if the project was going to survive.

With 7.x things seemed to have settled down a lot, but I still worry  
about it.

I quit running FreeBSD servers because they were actually crashing on  
me, something I'm not used to.

FreeBSD 2.x and 4.x... I ran them for years without issue.

I ran NetBSD for nearly 10 years with few incidents, except a long- 
running problem with their kernel memory allocator.  You could fix it  
by just increasing a parameter, but it did take them awhile to fix the  
problem so that wasn't necessary.

Lately with FreeBSD 7 at work I've been having a lot of problems with  
UDMA issues, something which has been a problem since the 5.x releases.

>>> dows surrogate.
>> Linux is just a kernel.
> I am quite aware of that. But most people aren't and I used "Linux"  
> the
> way most people do: Linux as a set of complete OS distributions.

I understand that, but Linux is no more "like Windows" than Solaris or  
BSD with all those layers on top.

How can Linux running Gnome be accused of being Windows-centric but  
not Solaris which primarily focuses on desktop Gnome too?

> As I said: I reffer to the the whole shebang as you can't separate the
> pieces that easily. There is a lot of influence kernel => userland and
> vice versa.

Like what?

I don't see anything in the kernel that is like the NT kernel myself.

In fact, the zealots are keeping a lot of needed kernel changes out  
which would help in the desktop area, like stable binary interfaces,  
etc.

That's very un-Windows for example.

For the wrong reasons of course.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com