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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 05 2019, @12:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the potato-potatoe dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Wednesday November 06 2019, @12:17AM (1 child)

    by Pav (114) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @12:17AM (#916617)

    Perhaps you're not old enough to remember when BSD was just becoming competative on the desktop. Apple swooped in, hired away many of the key developers, and made a proprietary fork. This left the BSD desktop bled of developer energy, and pulled away many of those advanced users who would have otherwise potentially become the developers of the future.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday November 23 2019, @12:23PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Saturday November 23 2019, @12:23PM (#923797) Journal
    I am old enough to remember that and, indeed, I know many of the people involved. Your memory seems to be quite faulty. First, Apple did not hire any of the people that were working on desktop-facing parts of the OS and they did not make a proprietary fork. Apple inherited OPENSTEP, which was derived from NeXTSTEP, which used a single-server Mach microkernel with a 3BSD-derived UNIX server and userland. They updated this using components from FreeBSD and open sourced the result. They funded the development of the TrustedBSD MAC framework (upstreamed to FreeBSD, used to implement the sandboxing framework on OS X / iOS) and Capsicum (not shipped in OS X), invested a lot in LLVM (now the default toolchain in FreeBSD) and contributed various other smaller things.

    Linux did a lot more damage to FreeBSD on the desktop than Apple did. Several things hurt FreeBSD a lot around that time. One of the big ones was Eric Anholt, who maintained the DRI driver stack for FreeBSD being hired by Intel to work on the Linux DRI drivers and encouraged to stop working on FreeBSD support. One was the Linux ALSA + a load of sound daemon mess. Desktop developers spent a lot of effort rewriting things to use ALSA. FreeBSD implemented the OSS APIs and had in-kernel low-latency sound mixing back around 2001. The entire userspace sound daemon mess that culminated in PulseAudio was to work around shortcomings in the Linux kernel and resulted in portable applications moving to Linux-specific APIs. The other was the big HAL / udev debacle. Freedesktop.org tried to standardise OS abstractions that made it possible to run things on any underlying OS that provided the relevant functionality, Linux developers (encouraged by Red Hat and later Canonical) pushed the major DEs to drop those and depend on Linux-specific interfaces.

    A modern FreeBSD system incorporates code that took multiple tens of man-years to write from Apple. For it to be useful as a desktop, it has to include a similar amount of extra effort working around the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model adopted by the major Linux vendors to avoid portable OS abstractions. If you want to blame someone for FreeBSD's failure on the desktop, Red Hat is a far better target than Apple.

    --
    sudo mod me up