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BSD better than Linux

2002-06-04 17:41:23+00 by Dan Lyke 25 comments

I'm sure y'all have seen this before, but I was trying to find it when I was over at Alec's the other day, and couldn't get to it, so here's Why BSD is better than Linux.Vinyl tops are great and all, but I think maddog in the back right of the Linux picture is the real deal clincher.

[ related topics: Free Software Humor Open Source ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 04:25:26+00 by: anser

Does anybody know who the daemonette is?

PS FreeBSD *does* kick Linux butt if anyone is keeping score :)

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 15:50:36+00 by: Shawn

I hear people say this from time to time. But nobody has yet explained why. (It reminds me of back in the day when everybody was telling me I needed to drop command.com and get 4dos - but nobody could give me so much as a feature list of what 4dos gave me that command.com didn't.)

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 16:07:30+00 by: TC

Well BSD does seem to be able to runner faster with an optimized kernel and I am "told" that it is more stable by uber geeks and they do have those cool horns but I think it's more of a social/religious thing than technical. Linux has become too mainstream, so cranky sysadmins need a place to gather away from the bright lights of public scrutiny. I think this is why you see people cringling to the bambo raft of debian while they watch the red hat super carrier sail by <giggle>

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 17:44:32+00 by: Dan Lyke

Shawn, the main reason I could see for 4DOS was the command history, although there were plenty of TSRs to give you that under command.com. 4DOS also had better stuff for smarter .BAT files, but either way they were limited enough that just writing code was usually a smarter thing for me.

Todd, just you wait, when the RedHat monoculture grows large enough to attract the virus density of Outlook[Wiki], us Debian zealots will laugh.

anser, I did like FreeBSD's package system (a whole bunch of shell directories with make files to get the source), generally though the politics of BSD development have kept me away from that.

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 18:15:35+00 by: topspin [edit history]

The name of the new Debian release is woody. It follows, on several levels, that Dan would be a Debian devotee. <grin>

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 19:39:12+00 by: Dori

I hear people say this from time to time. But nobody has yet explained why.

Because it's what runs under OS X, of course!

(Owww, stop it guys, I'm joking, really! Oww!)

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 20:35:57+00 by: anser

The daemonette is Ceren Ercen, a genuine geekbabe from the Bay Area. Yes, I know the names are anagrams. Google her and see for yourself.

FreeBSD kicks Linux's butt because it hasn't forgotten its Unix roots as a text mode server OS. Linux is obsessed with Pee Cee workstation desktop junk and drivers for your MP3 player and game compatibility and whatnot. FreeBSD works out of the box as a high performance Net node. I like that!

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 20:43:24+00 by: anser

and I forgot to add: It Fights Crime.

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 20:52:03+00 by: Dan Lyke

Snort. The Google Search for Ceren Ercen brought me to the image on the bottom of "Technolust". And a graphic illustration of the only way to lock-up FreeBSD.

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 21:01:09+00 by: anser

This search link works better...

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 21:19:36+00 by: skrubly

I actually have that 'only way to lock up BSD' tshirt, but I don't tend to wear it out as much as I would because people tend to ask the weirdest fucking questions about it. It's weird, but when I'm at the grocery store, I don't really want to talk about computers OR cartoon bondage.

Skrubly

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 22:56:01+00 by: Shawn [edit history]

todd; Speed was generally never a concern of mine. As long as I'm not waiting hours for a process I'm relatively happy. Never could understand the hairs-breadth optimization obsession. The rest makes sense though ;-)

Dan; doskey took care of the command history issue right quick. And that was about the time 4dos came onto my radar. But I thought it odd that nobody would even attempt to answer my question. "What exactly is it that makes 4dos so necessary/cool to have?" was guaranteed to bring a screaching halt to any discussion. I mean it. People would just clamp their mouths shut and glare at me - or avoid eye contact and wander off.

anser; I guess I'm too much of a desktop geek to care then. Servers are useful, but the desktop is where I live 90% of my life.

Skrubly; You don't? That's exactly why I wear the darned things! I'm hoping I'll discover somebody else who thinks my kinks are cool.

#Comment made: 2002-06-05 23:57:13+00 by: Pete [edit history]

4dos

tab complete for commands and filenames (and directories)
enhanced batch language
color-coded directory listings (user configurable)
extensive mouse-driven help and reference system, including niceties like ansi and ascii tables
freed precious <640 KB RAM
whoop-ass command line history, including a browsable pop-up window approach

BSD

I thought the easiest way to lock up BSD was to run it on any trivial hardware the core team doesn't happen to own...?

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 00:56:26+00 by: Dan Lyke

Pete, I guess 8.3 filenames is why I never realized 4DOS had command completion...

And on BSD and hardware, the same can be said for Solaris Intel. Except where they've ripped off the Linux drivers.

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 01:01:51+00 by: John Anderson

dori: yay, os x!

skrubly: i get some of those looks when i wear my 'total world domination' tee shirt; i often wonder if the people giving me the odd looks are trying to figure out if i'm part of the bdsm sub-culture. (i'm not, so if they're signifying back, i'm probably missing it.)

dan, wrt solaris/intel: yes, except for the linux drivers, except where they fscked those up too. my current gig is almost directly due to solaris/intel sucking so very very bad that ork was forced to go to linux -- they don't want to pay $un hardware prices anymore, and they got sick of not knowing whether the next shipment of *ell hardware was going to work or not.

they still want $un reliability, of course, but that's a different rant...

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 02:34:40+00 by: Pete [edit history]

Argh, it keeps eating my formatting, even explicit html.

or not. it kept popping back and forth.

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 02:46:33+00 by: Pete

Ohh, two more:

a "global" command modifier, which did just what you'd think
a "select" modifier that presented a navigable full-screen toggle menu of all the entries in the directory for interactive choosing which entries to apply the entered command to

good shiznit. Some "Norton" outfit licensed it for inclusion with their "utilities" as Ndos.

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 07:54:14+00 by: Shawn

Pete; where were you ten years ago? <sigh...> I've discovered the existence of many of these features now that I'm using Linux more regularly, but back then I was just living in ignorance. At the time, it felt like everything was as good as it could get :-\

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 11:49:25+00 by: pharm

She's selling the costume :)

http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/daemonette/info.txt

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 12:12:11+00 by: Pete

JP Software is still around and they make versions for all the Win32 systems, so if you use any version of any MS OS, it's not too late. :)

http://www.jpsoft.com/products.htm

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 12:29:04+00 by: topspin

That cute little daemonette, Ceren, appears to be selling the costume because:

The shine has partially worn off from the shirt (but still mostly there on the leggings) and it requires several minutes of polishing before it's ready to wear out onto the floor of the convention. This is mainly why I'm selling it. I really don't have this kind of time in the mornings.

Now, I'm retired from this sorta thing, but some geek needs to offer to buff her on the mornings of Linuxworld. "Buffer overrun" could be a problem, however.

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 12:40:49+00 by: Pete

Hah, one more:

An "except" modifier available on its own or in combination with "global"

And, if memory serves, they were smarter about wildcards, allowing stuff like del f*er*.*

Or

except *.jpg global /i del f*er*.*

(/i on global makes it keep traversing the tree if it found nothing to operate on in a directory)

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 16:21:48+00 by: Pete

I linked over to this discussion from my site, but it's not generating a backlink here. I did excercise the link a couple times from multple IP's, several hours ago. What's up?

http://norton.blogspot.com

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 16:26:48+00 by: Dan Lyke

Don't know, there have been a few others that should be getting back links, but aren't. I'll try to look at this soon, but I'm not sure when that'll be. Leaving a job is hard work.

#Comment made: 2002-06-06 17:48:26+00 by: Dan Lyke

Okay, took a short break and fixed two bugs, and we should have back-links galore. If you can hit the link from your archive entry, that'd be helpful in the future. Where I see that happening regularly I can pull the main page link off and have less clutter.