Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:31:54 -0500 From: Jessica Mahoney <root@varusonline.com> To: Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Current Gentoo user Message-ID: <4762073A.4090402@varusonline.com> In-Reply-To: <49bf44f10712132026p21717597wc6e592a1a19dad4e@mail.gmail.com> References: <49bf44f10712122100y45f12f77q4ae47f311905be25@mail.gmail.com> <200712131947.lBDJlMeZ008204@satan.anjos.strangled.net> <49bf44f10712132026p21717597wc6e592a1a19dad4e@mail.gmail.com>
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Grant wrote: >>> It has recently come to my attention that FreeBSD is "similar" to >>> Gentoo Linux. I've been a Gentoo user for about 5 years and I love >>> the concept, but it feels like the project is slowing down. I like to >>> learn/use/know one OS for server, media system, laptop, router, etc. >>> How would you compare the two OSes? >>> >>> - Grant >>> >> I only have the time to give you a very general impression. >> I use FreeBSD at home since at least 1995, I deployed Gentoo at my current >> employment because people were less afraid of it than of FreeBSD. >> For me, Gentoo is the next best thing to FreeBSD... >> >> I don't know, but I guess that Gentoo portage was heavily inspired by FreeBSD >> ports, in that with one command you fetch the source, apply patches, compile and install. >> >> Gentoo however, takes the concept much further in that everything you have on >> your system is a port, so portage really controls everything. Even when you >> install a stage-3 tarball, all files are also registered with portage. >> >> On FreeBSD, the ports collection is only used for addons to the base system; the >> base system could be compared to a stage-3 tarball except that it is much more >> complete (cron, syslog, dhclient, bind9, openssh, tcsh, nvi, ncurses, sendmail, >> pam, opie, telnet, ftp, traceroute, to name a few are installed in the base system) >> so you really can have an operational base system. >> For instance, if you want to install a web server, perhaps the base system + >> apache is enough, the same goes for database server. >> Typically, the base system plus what is required for your application. >> Not so with Gentoo. >> >> Because such fundamental services such as cron, syslog, etc are on the base >> system, most things also come much more configured than they do on Gentoo. >> It is a lot more work to get things going on Gentoo. >> Even so, FreeBSD is clean enough to fit in about 250MB. >> >> Now, for server or router: in my opinion, FreeBSD is much easier to setup for >> any server setup (of course, I've been using it for much longer). For router, >> you don't need to add anything to the base system. >> FreeBSD is much, much, much better documented than Gentoo, most common server >> setups are covered in the handbook. >> Gentoo's documentation is very nice, but still covers only a few loose topics. >> Most of the time you have to resort to disperse Linux documentation if you're >> not a long time Linux geek. >> >> For media/desktop system: FreeBSD is probably worse. It's a pain to get >> google-earth working on FreeBSD, lots of Linux applications crash a lot. Even >> FreeBSD natively compiled applications such as mplayer are hard to get properly >> compiled. >> >> On Gentoo it's quite safe to put CFLAGS=-O3 in make.conf, not on FreeBSD. The >> USE flags framework work surprisingly well, there's ufed, revdep-rebuild, etc. >> Not so much on FreeBSD, the older ports system is evolving slowly. The Gentoo >> designers benefited from designing from scratch. >> On the other hand, the ports collection on FreeBSD is much less likely to break >> things than portage is. Try updating expat on Gentoo and everything will stop >> working; on FreeBSD, the shared libraries are kept and everything keeps working. >> Actually, the ports collection in itself seldom breaks anything. Portage does. >> >> For laptop: I run FreeBSD amd64 on my laptop, everything works very well. And it >> is a radeon card, 3D without hardware acceleration is surprisingly fast these days. >> There's no hibernation. I don't know if you have that on Gentoo. >> >> AMD64: Runs lots of 386 binaries unless they require a lot of i386 ports, which would >> require you to install a i386 ports tree side by side with amd64; this isn't supported. >> You can't get linux_dri on AMD64, so that locks google-earth out for me. >> >> >> After two years using Gentoo, after the first very positive impression, I'm a >> bit tired of breaking things due to updating one port. >> It's also too much of a pain reconfiguring and recompiling the Linux kernel. >> Perhaps it's my lack of experience. >> On FreeBSD, you can compile the kernel every day with no trouble at all, even >> the whole base system weekly, if you're so inclined. I can't be objective, but I >> think in this respect FreeBSD is much, much, much better. >> > > I just had a search through the FreeBSD ports list and just about > everything I user is listed there. gnucash, gimp, firefox, etc. Does > that mean they are work perfectly on FreeBSD? > > - Grant > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-advocacy-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > > I use FreeBSD almost exclusively (my main desktop is a Mac), and everything on FreeBSD works with as few bugs as their Mac OS X counterparts (where such counterparts exist, such as Firefox). On my laptop, they also run about the same speed as they do on the Mac. (Mac is 3GHz, laptop is 1.8GHz) -Jessica
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