Date: Fri, 4 May 2012 23:42:20 -0400 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ways to promote FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20120504234220.5ba8141b@bhuda.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <20120504191111.153790@gmx.com> References: <20120504191111.153790@gmx.com>
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On Fri, 04 May 2012 15:11:10 -0400 "Dieter BSD" <dieterbsd@engineer.com> wrote: > *WHY* is Linux so much more popular than the BSDs? My "newsbyte" answer is: BSD is Unix for people who love quality software. Linux is Unix for people who hate Microsoft. There are a lot more of the latter than the former. Expanded, most linux distros make gaining users more important than software quality. So things are made as easy as possible for the user: you install everything by default, configure everything for them, possibly even make it hard for them to "break" things by misconfiguring something. BSD makes software quality more important than gaining users. Just look at where there effort goes! Frankly, while I'd love to see BSD be more popular, I'd rather it not happen at the expense of the software quality. This shows up in *all* the software. If I install third party software from the BSD package system, it usually shows up with the default config from the original author. Any changes are usually the result of working around BSD not being the author's development system. On Linux systems, I find that stuff comes out of the box with some non-standard default configuration designed "to make things easier". So I have to spend time figuring out what was changed, and why, and how to put it back. In some cases (like bash), it's easier to punt on the package and replace it with different software (as in: how do you *turn off* the color ls in bash on RHEL!?). <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/ Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
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