Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:43:33 -0800 From: Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Current Gentoo user Message-ID: <49bf44f10712140643p6b671948n168fdf1b24e7bb13@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4762073A.4090402@varusonline.com> References: <49bf44f10712122100y45f12f77q4ae47f311905be25@mail.gmail.com> <200712131947.lBDJlMeZ008204@satan.anjos.strangled.net> <49bf44f10712132026p21717597wc6e592a1a19dad4e@mail.gmail.com> <4762073A.4090402@varusonline.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> >>> It has recently come to my attention that FreeBSD is "similar" to > >>> Gentoo Linux. I've been a Gentoo user for about 5 years and I love > >>> the concept, but it feels like the project is slowing down. I like to > >>> learn/use/know one OS for server, media system, laptop, router, etc. > >>> How would you compare the two OSes? > >>> > >>> - Grant > >>> > >> I only have the time to give you a very general impression. > >> I use FreeBSD at home since at least 1995, I deployed Gentoo at my current > >> employment because people were less afraid of it than of FreeBSD. > >> For me, Gentoo is the next best thing to FreeBSD... > >> > >> I don't know, but I guess that Gentoo portage was heavily inspired by FreeBSD > >> ports, in that with one command you fetch the source, apply patches, compile and install. > >> > >> Gentoo however, takes the concept much further in that everything you have on > >> your system is a port, so portage really controls everything. Even when you > >> install a stage-3 tarball, all files are also registered with portage. > >> > >> On FreeBSD, the ports collection is only used for addons to the base system; the > >> base system could be compared to a stage-3 tarball except that it is much more > >> complete (cron, syslog, dhclient, bind9, openssh, tcsh, nvi, ncurses, sendmail, > >> pam, opie, telnet, ftp, traceroute, to name a few are installed in the base system) > >> so you really can have an operational base system. > >> For instance, if you want to install a web server, perhaps the base system + > >> apache is enough, the same goes for database server. > >> Typically, the base system plus what is required for your application. > >> Not so with Gentoo. > >> > >> Because such fundamental services such as cron, syslog, etc are on the base > >> system, most things also come much more configured than they do on Gentoo. > >> It is a lot more work to get things going on Gentoo. > >> Even so, FreeBSD is clean enough to fit in about 250MB. > >> > >> Now, for server or router: in my opinion, FreeBSD is much easier to setup for > >> any server setup (of course, I've been using it for much longer). For router, > >> you don't need to add anything to the base system. > >> FreeBSD is much, much, much better documented than Gentoo, most common server > >> setups are covered in the handbook. > >> Gentoo's documentation is very nice, but still covers only a few loose topics. > >> Most of the time you have to resort to disperse Linux documentation if you're > >> not a long time Linux geek. > >> > >> For media/desktop system: FreeBSD is probably worse. It's a pain to get > >> google-earth working on FreeBSD, lots of Linux applications crash a lot. Even > >> FreeBSD natively compiled applications such as mplayer are hard to get properly > >> compiled. > >> > >> On Gentoo it's quite safe to put CFLAGS=-O3 in make.conf, not on FreeBSD. The > >> USE flags framework work surprisingly well, there's ufed, revdep-rebuild, etc. > >> Not so much on FreeBSD, the older ports system is evolving slowly. The Gentoo > >> designers benefited from designing from scratch. > >> On the other hand, the ports collection on FreeBSD is much less likely to break > >> things than portage is. Try updating expat on Gentoo and everything will stop > >> working; on FreeBSD, the shared libraries are kept and everything keeps working. > >> Actually, the ports collection in itself seldom breaks anything. Portage does. > >> > >> For laptop: I run FreeBSD amd64 on my laptop, everything works very well. And it > >> is a radeon card, 3D without hardware acceleration is surprisingly fast these days. > >> There's no hibernation. I don't know if you have that on Gentoo. > >> > >> AMD64: Runs lots of 386 binaries unless they require a lot of i386 ports, which would > >> require you to install a i386 ports tree side by side with amd64; this isn't supported. > >> You can't get linux_dri on AMD64, so that locks google-earth out for me. > >> > >> > >> After two years using Gentoo, after the first very positive impression, I'm a > >> bit tired of breaking things due to updating one port. > >> It's also too much of a pain reconfiguring and recompiling the Linux kernel. > >> Perhaps it's my lack of experience. > >> On FreeBSD, you can compile the kernel every day with no trouble at all, even > >> the whole base system weekly, if you're so inclined. I can't be objective, but I > >> think in this respect FreeBSD is much, much, much better. > >> > > > > I just had a search through the FreeBSD ports list and just about > > everything I user is listed there. gnucash, gimp, firefox, etc. Does > > that mean they are work perfectly on FreeBSD? > > > > - Grant > I use FreeBSD almost exclusively (my main desktop is a Mac), and > everything on FreeBSD works with as few bugs as their Mac OS X > counterparts (where such counterparts exist, such as Firefox). On my > laptop, they also run about the same speed as they do on the Mac. (Mac > is 3GHz, laptop is 1.8GHz) > > -Jessica That sounds great. After some more research, I'm between Gentoo, *BSD, and possibly Debian. Can anyone who understands my mindset compare the *BSDs to each other? What about Debian? Which is being most actively developed? Is there a good virtualization tool for FreeBSD that will run Windows XP on my laptop? - Grant
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?49bf44f10712140643p6b671948n168fdf1b24e7bb13>