Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:26:31 -0800 From: Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Current Gentoo user Message-ID: <49bf44f10712132026p21717597wc6e592a1a19dad4e@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <200712131947.lBDJlMeZ008204@satan.anjos.strangled.net> References: <49bf44f10712122100y45f12f77q4ae47f311905be25@mail.gmail.com> <200712131947.lBDJlMeZ008204@satan.anjos.strangled.net>
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> > 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
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