Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 17:22:40 -0500 From: Anthony Philipp <philipp1@uiuc.edu> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows XP Message-ID: <20050626222239.GB30179@zeus.itg.uiuc.edu> In-Reply-To: <20050626120005.9BF4916A423@hub.freebsd.org> References: <20050626120005.9BF4916A423@hub.freebsd.org>
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> I have put an easier version of the comparison up at: > > http://www.home.no/hedhnta/versus.txt > > So please post corrections referring to each paragraph. > It would also be nice to include Mac OS X in this comparison. 1.3 All Windows users are familiar with the "Blue Screen of Death". Poor reliability is one of the major drawbacks of Windows. Some of the major issues have been fixed in Windows 2000, but "code bloat" has introduced many more reliability problems. Windows 2000 uses a lot of system resources and it is very difficult to keep the system up for more than a couple of months without it reverting to a crawl as memory gets corrupted and filesystems fragmented. This is from the website mentioned above. If you're going to compare FreeBSD to Linux to Windows XP at least make sure you're comparing Windows XP and not Windows 2000. Also I don't think we should copy MS and refer to "Linux" and mean a specific distrobution. I suggest you pick a specific distrobution and compare that to the other OSes. My personal suggestion would be Debian, since this seems to be the OS which would give FreeBSD the best run for it's money. I also think it would be a good idea to include OSX in the comparison, however you might want to compile to different lists. One would be for people comparing the OSes from a server perspective, and one would be from a desktop perspective. 4.2 The Linux ext2 filesystem gets its performance from having an asynchronous mount. You can mount FreeBSD UFS filesystems as asynchronous but this is very dangerous and no seasoned Unix admin would do this. It's amazing that Linux is designed this way by default. Often a hard carsh permanently damages a mount. FreeBSD or Solaris can sustain a very hard crash with only minor data loss, and the filesystem will be remountable with few problems. I don't think it is really fair for us to compare ext2 and UFS2 and FAT. Perhaps we should be comparing NTFS vs reiserfs or JFS vs UFS2. I know we don't have to stage the comparison to make FreeBSD stand out. It can stand on its own performance. 9.2 Linux is a Unix-like kernel that must be combined with the GNU system to make a complete operating system. Linux does not use any version control system so all bug-fixes and enhancements must be emailed back and forth on mailing lists and ultimately submitted to the one person (Linus) who has authority to commit the code to the tree. Due to the overwhelming amount of code that gets written, it is impossible for one person to adequately quality control all of the pending changes. For this reason there is a lot of code in Linux that was hastily written and would never have been accepted into a more conservative operating system. I don't think this is true any longer. 9.3 Microsoft Windows is a closed-source operating system driven by market demand rather than technical merit. New technologies are rushed into the product before they have been properly designed or fully implemented. Very little is known about the internal development infrastructure of Microsoft but the "blue-screen of death" speaks for itself. When was the last time you had a blue screen of death? For me it was over a year ago when I was having a hardware issue. Just based off of my anecdotal evidence FreeBSD has crashed less than either my Gentoo system or my windows system, but I don't think it is fair to say that Windows blue screens on a fairly regular basis. Also I think you should add an ease of use section. This is why most people use Windows or OSX over some *nix system. That and it is what other people they know are using. This means they can get help from their friends. This is not something which should be discounted. > Thank you all! > Now let's get down to work! > I think it is a good idea, just needs a few revisions, keep up the good work! Anthony Philipp
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