BSD For Linux Users (update)

[Frank Leonhardt]

On 01/03/2013 19:08, Diane Bruce wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 10:33:57AM -0700, Derek Wood wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 07:50:52PM -0000, sib at tormail.org wrote:
>>> My question to you: Would anyone here be interested in updating it (or
>>> just helping a bit) to be more accurate with the modern FreeBSD world, and
>>> has a place to host it that we can link to? I think this would really be a
>>> nice improvement and help us teach more new users about how we do things.
>>>
> I've been wanting this done for quite some time. I'm spread very thin.
>
> Please do it. :-)
>
>
>>> Also, a few official pages on freebsd.org are growing a bit old
>>> (references to CVS, etc.) and might need similar treatment:
>>>
>>> FreeBSD: An Open Source Alternative to Linux
>>> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-comparison/article.html
>>> FreeBSD Quickstart Guide for Linux Users
>>> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/index.html
>>> Comparing BSD and Linux
>>> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html
>>>
>>> I'm going to begin going through all of these pages in the next few days
>>> and see what needs to be updated and how much work this will be, but I
>>> would greatly appreciate any help from the community!
>>>
> Thank you.
>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> freebsd-doc at freebsd.org mailing list
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-doc
>>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-doc-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>> My suggestion would be to host it on wiki.freebsd.org and then
>> eventually convert it into an article or chapter of the handbook. If
>> you don't have an account for the wiki you can drop by #bsddocs or
>> #bsdports on efnet and someone will get you sorted.
>>
>> As for the article, I think it would be most productive to examine
>> which of those you linked can be replaced with the document you intend
>> to write, then make sure that the new document includes the
>> information of the outgoing documents. We don't really need >3 "Linux
>> vs FreeBSD" articles, just one really good one.
>> _______________________________________________
>>

I've been thinking about this since it was posted yesterday. The old 
article was a little subjective where I'd have preferred if it were not. 
He does say he's a FreeBSD fan, that it was a rant, and that the article 
is justifying this point of view, so I can hardly complain to the author.

I wrote something similar to this a long while back, but I can't find 
it. I think it was for print, so Google hasn't helped.

It strikes me that different people use FreeBSD (and Linux) in 
completely different ways. I always talk to it using ssh, so comparisons 
about X-Window, desktops and graphics cards are irrelevant. If a new 
universal article was produced it would need input from different 
perspectives.

There are also important technical differences that seem to have arisen 
since the original article. For example, IIRC, Linux still uses block 
devices (i.e. block cached) whereas I remember reading a rant somewhere 
in the FreeBSD manual explaining that this was probably introduced to 
the UNIX kernel by Beelzebub himself and FreeBSD was now well rid of it 
due to the well known difficulty reporting errors to the process that 
performed a write, and the fact it was confusing the character-level 
driver code. The minutia of this argument is beyond me, but I can't help 
feeling that modern (caching) disk subsystems mean that we're actually 
no better off from a safety standpoint, and might be seeing a 
performance hit. And is having ZFS a trump card?

Another big plus about compiling from source code - I've just got BIND 
9.9 running on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi. It didn't take long, and I 
didn't have to do anything much different from a familiar RELEASE i386 
system. (If anyone else wishes to try this, 9.8 is easier...) Linux may 
be cross-platform too, but the binary packages aren't! (And that's 
before we get to x86 CPU-specific optimisations compiled in).

And don't forget SMP.

The original blog post contained spirited praise of the concept of a 
base system, ports and releases; in my mind a tad over-done. I think it 
would benefit from explanation of other technical differences too, of 
the type that only a wider team could assemble.

So if anyone's doing this, please count me and my perspective in. It 
will give me something to do while I locate my missing Zip drive 
collection ;-)

Regards, Frank.