Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 22:50:07 +0530 From: "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@online.fr> To: dereck <dereckhaskins@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The future of NetBSD Message-ID: <6a506d980608311020j156ac46cyb92f1c7bec80d439@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20060831142321.27596.qmail@web30602.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <950621ad0608310654h78ae0023g346abd108815ae72@mail.gmail.com> <20060831142321.27596.qmail@web30602.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 8/31/06, dereck <dereckhaskins@yahoo.com> wrote: > [Linux] are copying known work, shooting for a target > that has already been hit. Hit by Mac OS X, perhaps. Which I can't install on my computer even if I wanted to: Apple won't let me. The target -- a user-friendly, reliable unix -- hasn't been hit by anyone else. With today's Ubuntu, for example, I can plug in all the equipment I have -- memory sticks, digital cameras, whatever -- and it just works. If I pop in a CD-ROM it mounts automatically. If I pop in a DVD the DVD player opens. The only exception (out of the box) was my wireless PCMCIA card, but even that worked with ndiswrapper; installing the windows ndis driver was a single command. This sort of thing should be seen as essential -- today's computers are dynamic objects with peripherals being plugged in and removed all the time -- but, of the unixen, only Mac OS X handles it so easily. More importantly, the linux people have recognised this goal and worked towards it for years, via hal, dbus, etc, and it shows. Mac OS X hides its unix under the hood, but Linux has managed to reconfigure SysV-style Unix to behave well on modern desktop machines. The significance of this shouldn't be underestimated. But never mind all that: BSD types (I used FreeBSD for some years and still have Dragonfly on one partition) like to say how much more reliable BSD is. Linux's ext2/ext3 always comes in for particular scorn. Well, I tend to run unstable software and lately my hardware's getting unstable too -- so I have crashes now and then. On FreeBSD with UFS, more than once a crash totally hosed my system: I had to reinstall. People blamed it on ATA write-caching: the standard FreeBSD advice is "use SCSI". With linux/ext3 I've NEVER had a problem with a crash. The only time I got worried with the disk having mysterious timeout errors, it turned out to be bad sectors: a fsck with bad sector scan fixed that and I only lost one unimportant file. From my lurking on various lists, my impression is that UFS+softupdates is a horrendous mess that only Kirk McKusick understands (it seems I'm not the only one to suffer from trashed filesystems). If Linus gets hit by a bus, no problem for Linux, but if Kirk gets hit by a bus, better look for a new filesystem. The filesystem isn't the only thing: FreeBSD's USB drivers are (or were, last I checked) a disaster. You could panic the system just by unplugging at the wrong moment. I've never managed to do that with linux. Some of Linux's progress is indeed from corporate support, but much of it is from very smart individuals, like Stephen Tweedie, Andrew Morton, and, yes, Linus himself. Linus's "world domination" plans sounded amusing for years, but now it looks entirely possible. With the BSDs I can't see a role on the desktop. Even something like PC-BSD is where Linux was years ago. Rahul
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?6a506d980608311020j156ac46cyb92f1c7bec80d439>