From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 24 22:07:09 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id WAA08416 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 24 Jan 1996 22:07:09 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost.lightside.com (hamby1.lightside.net [198.81.209.17]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id WAA08386 for ; Wed, 24 Jan 1996 22:06:53 -0800 (PST) Received: (from jehamby@localhost) by localhost.lightside.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) id WAA00300; Wed, 24 Jan 1996 22:07:05 -0800 Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 22:07:05 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby X-Sender: jehamby@localhost To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Linux Matters (Feb. '96 Byte) (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk I just read another four-page article on Linux in Byte. This one was especially disturbing as it gave NO mention to FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSDI, Solaris, or ANY other non-Linux, non-MSDOS operating system, not even in a sidebar. At risk of sounding like one of the "Linux fanatics" that the author mentions, I think it stinks to see such a single-minded article when there are so many free OS's available. So I wrote this letter to the author and the Editors. Sorry to waste bandwidth with this, but if the Linux people managed to muscle their way into mainstream media with fanatical E-Mail tactics, a more civilized approach along the same lines may prove instructive. At any rate, I hope you enjoy, and feel free to write your own response... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 22:01:57 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby To: tyager@maxx.net Cc: editors@bix.com Subject: Linux Matters (Feb. '96 Byte) At the risk of sounding like one of the "Linux fanatics" mentioned in your Linux Matters article, I'm surprised that you didn't mention any of the OTHER free Unixes available for PC's, FreeBSD and NetBSD, or inexpensive commercial Unixes like BSDI and Solaris. I used Linux for a year on my PC at home before I discovered FreeBSD. The superior networking performance of FreeBSD (noticeable even on my slow PPP connection, and documented in benchmarks at http://plastique.stanford.edu) combined with the simplicity of a single distribution (compared with at least three slightly incompatible Linux distributions mentioned in your article), and the freedom from worrying whether my kernel, libc, ld.so, binutils, or other components are up-to-date (as is often the case with Linux when you want to play with a new program), led me to switch, and although I still have my Linux partition, I'm ready to delete it as soon as I need the disk space. Those are just three advantages of FreeBSD. There are others, and likewise, there are disadvantages relative to Linux. For example, with fewer FreeBSD users, there is less new development, especially in the crucial area of device drivers. My point is that no OS is perfect, and since there are an abundance of excellent free OS's for PC, you should have mentioned some others so that your readers will choose the best one for their purpose. A prime example of this is a Web, FTP, or other Internet server: FreeBSD's superior 4.4BSD networking code makes it the obvious choice, all other things being equal, yet I'm distressed there are hundreds of Internet sites run with Linux, nonetheless. However, the most impressive (in my opinion) site, Walnut Creek CDROM (the home FTP site of Slackware LINUX :-), which services 300+ simultaneous FTP sessions, and 30+ simultaneous WWW hits, plus Netscape secure HTTP, FTP mirroring, and a few interactive users, all on a single 100MHz Pentium, is run using FreeBSD! In short, while Linux is the most popular Unix for PC's, and deserves attention commensurate with its popularity in your magazine, I felt that a four-page article with no mention of the wide variety of non-Microsoft, non-Linux OS's available on the PC (not even a sidebar!) is really unfair. One final comment: I hope you don't discard my article as the ravings of a "FreeBSD fanatic." I'm really not, but the excessive fanaticism of Linux users (even while I was one of them) really gets to me when I see it in the mainstream press. Remember how you would've treated this article a year ago if you received it with Linux substituted for FreeBSD, and MS-DOS substituted for Linux! I hope you can find room in your Letters to the Editor for some small excerpt as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ P.S. I found your "The Sound and the Fury" sidebar doubly interesting because, some years back, I used to be an Amiga fanatic. To this day, I believe Commodore had a computer 10 years ahead of its time, and squandered it by their incompetence in marketing it, and lack of developer and user support. Still, the lack of hardware support led the Amiga to fall by the wayside technically, and while it's still a fun computer to use, it is severly lacking in horsepower. I would definitely not say that "The fanatical element" of the customer base hurt the Amiga, and any CEO who says this is an idiot, to say the least! If you have a loyal following, and you disown them when you start losing market share, you're left with nothing! I DOUBT that Apple's CEO would say that the fanatical Macintosh user base is a disadvantage to Apple's reputation, eh?