Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 15:25:06 +0000 From: Chris.Smith@raytheon.co.uk To: "Havener, Kevin" <Kevin.Havener@afccc.af.mil> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Relative Merits of FreeBSD Message-ID: <00256874.0054C059.00@rslhub.raytheon.co.uk>
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Hi, ** I run 'em both. Have the same philosophy as you. Can't say that ** there's much difference. ** I only track the stable releases of each, and Debian is getting a little ** long in the tooth right now, but it works fine. Debian 2.1 (potato if I remember) is very long in the tooth. It should be way up in the 2.2 series kernels by now but it's still being held back. I would suggest Slackware (http://www.slackware.com) or SuSE (http://www.suse.de/e) as a more standard distribution. Slackware is better on smaller/slower systems but SuSE will never require another download with 6 CD's off stuff. Of course I hate all these and would rather stick to FreeBSD 3.3 (he adds quickly) ** I think Debian is a little easier to set up, configure and upgrade, but ** with your background, you won't even notice that. Debian has many conflict issues which really do cause problems. Plus the fact that dpkg is very user unfriendly. ** Specifically, the answers to your questions, IMHO. from a similar level ** of user are: ** There isn't anything you can do in FreeBSD that you can't do in Debian. True, except for have a proper UNIX distribution (no offense to Debian, but Linux is only an implementation of POSIX. BSD really is UNIX). ** No difference in stability that I've noticed or speed, but I don't run ** any fancy window managers--I use a 486. I find that FreeBSD gives me more uptime than any other OS (I hate to say that Win2k is rather good though - dont flame me - please), and that Linux can be unstable. I usually run these OS's in a heavily loaded network environment, so this does make a difference. FreeBSD is way more stable in that department but from a user perspective there is very little difference. I don't run fancy WM's either. Our dual Xeon-450 system run twm (very fast!!). ** If you've been running Debian ** for awhile, you might want to run FreeBSD in parallel for awhile at ** least. Believe it or not, you've become adjusted to the Debian way, and ** you'll want some of the configuration items from your Debian setup. Do run in parallel, but I recommend keeping the Debian way of doing things well away from BSD. Try some of the specifics to BSD and see how they go. It's a new world, and it's a bright world with BSD. ** I intend to keep running them side by side for the forseeable future. ** I'll let you know if one begins to outperform the other for this level ** of use :-). Best thing to do is to follow the advice given by Kevin here and make your own choice, but being a BSD maniac, I'd rather go with BSD. ** Kevin Chris Smith Raytheon Systems Limited To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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