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System administrator and former ski instructor, Albert Valbuena, has posted a table with accompanying analysis comparing several of the BSDs against Illumos and Linux. Among the topics in the analysis are licensing, how licensing is abused by companies, benchmarking, and of course a comparison of how various features are or aren't implemented across the spectrum.
The writing of this piece comes from the annoyance I get from reading about the prominence of Linux (the kernel) in almost all the computing spaces. And since electronic devices are gaining relevance in our daily lives and society in general this question of prominence of not just Linux but 'X' gains importance too.
More specifically this writing comes after reading someone who has participated in relevant software which is in a gazillion people's pocket. In a very unfortunate reply to the question: 'What are the advantages Linux has over BSD now?' the individual in question (which I'd like to preserve his identity) replied something close to (I do paraphrase): Linux receives much more investment from companies and therefore more paid developers are in it, plus BSD's feature parity with that of Linux doesn't hold.
This is mainstream opinion. Linux is better than anything else and money is poured in constantly, more than in other platforms. And aside this is not true, this is not based in facts but on feelings. Most GNU/Linux distributions are very average on many aspects. The fact they run on many servers on this planet and many developers work on them, doesn't make them better than 'X'. They are popular but that's it.
The individual in question did not, because he could not, point to relevant feature differences bettween the two operating systems.
Now go back to the top of this article and start checking features in a specific OS and start comparing, from that fastly written, from the top of my head, chart. Have fun doing that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:06PM (3 children)
There's a lot of faffing around trying to find reasons to use *BSD over a Linux distro in this article...
...but 90% of the difference to an end user on either a Linux distribution or one of the *BSDs ends up being one of:
a: hardware support (particularly relevant for any sort of desktop use case, but even doing something like data processing with GPUs leads to Linux having a massive, clear advantage)
b: software support (this one is largely because of Linux-isms popping up in software, because most things should just build fine otherwise)
The internal details of each OS end up not mattering more than support resources (since if they did, no one would have ever spent money buying MS software in all of history).
I had a long writeup about the failings about the article, but really, the whole article is a directionless mess that just seems to boil down to "I don't like how Linux is succeeding and BSD isn't." This article is just a black hole that wastes the reader's time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @07:22PM (1 child)
Hardware support matters the least for desktop users. It only matters for people with cutting edge systems, developers, and gamers. Joe Schmoe with a 5 year old Walmart special doesn't have issues with hardware support no matter what he uses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @10:32PM
Joe Schmoe literally can't use his AMD integrated video or the wifi chipset that came with his machine. It has issues on Linux, let alone on BSD.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 06 2019, @03:58AM
This, this, this.
Question: does *BSD fulfill my use case, i.e., can it run this software on this hardware? No? Then it's useless.
I use FreeBSD because that's what FreeNAS uses. The fact that it uses FreeBSD rather than Linux is mostly irrelevant to me, I care about the use case.
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