General Unix Learning

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Tuesday 07 September 2004 12:15 pm, "hide110" <hide110 at us-it.net> 
wrote:
> Please forgive me if this is not the right place to turn but, I
> figure you all would be able to share your wisdom with me.
>
> I am a Windows user and I've hated it for the past few years.

I can relate, though I still keep it around for games and sometimes 
sound production stuff (which is really better on a Mac ...). I don't 
like Windows, but it still has its uses for me.

> The 
> Unix experience I have accrued has mainly been working from a shell
> account; nothing really in detail about the actual operating system
> or installation. I have considered FreeBSD & Linux, but really, for a
> desktop system do you guys think it's viable for a nearly pure unix
> newbie to tinker around with BSD?  Or would it be easier to start
> with Linux & eventually port over to BSD?

Well, I never took to Linux like some people, though I used it 
occasionally over the years and basically understood it, but when I 
discovered FreeBSD, everything was suddenly so much more logical - it 
made so much more sense. It's not as "user-friendly" as many Linux 
distros, but the way everything fits together - from the complete 
system approach to the ports system - makes it much easier to maintain 
and less hassle all around. Even Linux made more sense after I started 
learning FreeBSD. It does require some commitment on your part to learn 
it, but it's time well spent. Like others have mentioned, FreeBSD is 
more of a "pure" Unix-like OS than Linux is, but this means if you 
learn it you'll understand Unix (and by extension other *nixes) much 
better.

> Normally I'd take my own advice (if you want to use BSD, use BSD, if
> you want to use Linux at the end of the day, use that) but I'm just
> trying to be practical with all learning curves taken into
> consideration.

Try both - seriously, and you should try more than one Linux distro, 
too. I have Slackware, Win2k and FreeBSD on one machine - FreeBSD gets 
the most use, though Win gets fired up when I want to play a game (some 
good games have been written for *nix, but Win is still the only 
serious gaming platform). When it comes down to it, if you're going to 
use a window manager or desktop, it will look pretty much the same on 
any system - KDE on FreeBSD looks the same as it does on Linux, but 
what's underneath is what counts. Linux does have an edge with hardware 
support, but quite a lot of hardware works on FreeBSD. I'm running on a 
2GHz AthlonXP on an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe with an 8xAGP ATI Radeon 
9600XT. For a while, I didn't have 3D support in FreeBSD (though it 
worked in Linux), but after upgrading to 5.3 beta3 I now have it - this 
was not a big deal even when it wasn't there, as I don't play many 
games in *nix. As far as Linux, if you want to go the easy route, try 
Mandrake or SuSE. If you want "pure" Linux, try Slackware, and some of 
the other hardcore people tend to distros like Debian and Gentoo - the 
latter is interesting, as it uses an installation helper called 
portage, which was inspired by BSD's ports. Although some people swear 
by it, I'd avoid anything-Red Hat (e.g., Fedora). RPMs are a nightmare. 
And after you've tried at least a couple distros of Linux, try FreeBSD 
and compare. It may not be right for you, but you might not want to use 
anything else after you do ... hey, happened to me ;)

> My deepest apologies if I should not be asking something like this
> here.  But any replies would be terribly appreciated.

No, this is great - we finally have some on-topic conversation! W00t!

- jt