Date: Thu, 23 Jan 97 15:02:27 +0100 From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.COM Subject: Re: *BSD comparision (fwd) Message-ID: <9701231402.AA26901@wavehh.hanse.de> References: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970122164001.521A-100000@stanton-1-1.quick.net> <2013.853998985@time.cdrom.com>
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Jordan wrote: >someone else wrote: >> Thought the www page may be of interest; >With due deference to Martin, I've never cared for this comparison >very much. It's too haphazard in its coverage, does not compare the >relative merits of each OS in a structured fashion (leaping instead >from disassociated topic to disassociated topic to the general >confusion of the reader) and it's far too biased towards the >perspective of a research guy with specific interests which probably >overlap with less than 1% of the existing *BSD user base. No offence taken, that's in fact what I think my document is (maybe I should label it as such a bit more). I think the problem is that people who cared enough for their OS to try several over a long period are very likely to have a strong interest of some sort. Strong interests of any sort are likely to fall within the 1%. I just cleaned the document up, BTW, removing some glibberisch (and leave it unstructured :-). >Unfortunately, there are few other people willing to sit down and >craft such comparisons so it's all that's available right now. If we >could get someone disconnected from either camp to do an out-of-box >evaluation of the systems, using both for several months with an >entirely fresh perspective and writing up their general experiences >with using the systems, that would indeed be valuable. That's quite impossible, I'm afraid. I.e. starting from scratch will mean to take installation into account and NetBSD will clearly loose against FreeBSD and a Linux/*BSD comparision will probably be more hardware-dependend than anything else. The desktop user market is not important enough for Unix clones, working towards setting up a nice GUI-oriented system from scratch with few experience doesn't cover much more than a few % of the user base also. After all, people like most on this list can bring up a system no matter how bad the provided installation tools are. The differences most important for people like us are those that arise when using the system for specialized work of some sort, each taking 1% of the existing base. It's the number of hours or days one has to sit down to work around something that's in the way. Maybe the right thing is to label pages like mine as "how I came to choose my OS(es)" and link a larger number of such Web pages, ideally on the same server and under some kind of common look. A collection of such documents would probably be more useful than just to support new users in choosing a Unix clone. By reading such descriptions, people looking for a Unix clone might get a better idea what experienced people actually do on their Unix clones and they get triggered to ask themself how limited their old OS might be in supporting the same work. We should show that Unix these days is not to offer the same workflow as Windows with more stability and for less money. We have some very advanced tools that fit the typical Unix work style, CVS/RCS, m4, some Emacs-tools, find | xargs grep, TCP/IP services etcetcetc. It's important to tell people about these tools and what our workstyle is. As always in marketing, it's not easy to transport a message people don't want to spend the reading time for. But I can tell from the email feedback to my page that people reading it *are* open to read about such things. Reading the client log for my *BSD comparision, I see that about half of all people use MS-Windows to access a die-hard-specialized comparision of FreeBSD and NetBSD. That are 200 people every month who actually use a toy OS and are interestedt in reading about Unix workstyle. I doubt most of these are in the business of deciding between the two BSD systems, but all of them are open to be told about Unix and the way we do things. A collection of pages with descriptions in the line "how I came to choose my OS" can turn our apparent disadvantage of having several Unix and free Unix systems into an advance. Seeing how different needs lead people to choose different OSes and Unix system will give users an impuls to rething their own needs for computing tools and whether learning something new might be worth the effort. I'm busy right now and this message is already too long, but should you think in the same way, I welcome your descriptions to be put besides mine. Martin P.S. Of course *my* workstyle is rather (cons 'foo 'bar) than `grep | foo | bar` :-) -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org Fax.: +4940 5228536 "As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't ex- plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
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