BSD and Linux Differences | Hacker News Reader

BSD and Linux Differences

rootbsd.net

14 pointsliangzan6 comments

Strange article -- half polemic half unnecessary (anyone who spends 5 minutes reading up on BSD would have heard of ports).

For a more detailed take on BSD vis-a-vis Linux: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin... . BSD user's point of view, target audience Linux users.

In the first part, they are comparing apples and oranges, and in a very meaningless way. Compare FreeBSD to Debian or Redhat or Suse or Ubuntu or anything, if you want to. What sense does this make? If you were going to use Linux, you would use some distro, so compare FreeBSD to that distro.

Performance part doesn't really say anything. It's far too vague and incomplete.

And ports could be easily compared to, say, Gentoo system, or something similar. Just describing them doesn't make much sense, given that you are targeting mostly current FreeBSD users. I wouldn't even rule out a possibility that there is some Linux system using NetBSD pkgsrc, as it should be quite portable (and comparable to the ports).

In summary, the article is quite bad :-)

There's some technical inaccuracies too - eg, FreeBSD has ACLs, implying that Linux doesn't in Linux-based OSs. RHEL/CentOS and Fedora have had ACLs by default for years now and they're easily enabled on Ubuntu/Debian if you need them.

'Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. ' is just as true of Linux OSs too.

As an avid FreeBSD user, I must say that the article didn't really provide an unbiased comparison of Linux to FreeBSD. It didn't offer any of the advantages Linux may have over BSD.

Linux has an amazing community with better application support. Linux also has an optimized C library. For example, you should take a look at BSD's strlen() versus GNU's strlen().

BSD implementation of strlen() is handwritten in assembler for most architectures, and is optimized. The misunderstanding about it not being optimized is probably because someone read the fall-back non-optimized C implementation and missed architecture-specific directories.

This was discussed in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510832

Edit: glibc also doesn't use the generic optimized version in C on some architectures, see for example: http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i3...

The article is comaring FreeBSD to Linux in general (not BSD-in-general vs Linux-in-general as I had thought from the title).

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