Archived thread 325540 from BSD. Markdown source: BSD/thread_325540_What_does_BSD_have_on_linux.md
Ive read a lot about people saying BSD is so much better than linux (mainly because its a real Unix distro).
What do you have to say? Sorry I cannot put any articles up at the moment in proof of my statement above.
But personally I love Ubuntu Linux and may have found a home. But, with all this BSD hype, I want to try it out. Is it worth it?
BSD has better hardware support due to the way it is licensed it can actually legally include binary modules. It's quite a bit quicker than Linux, OpenBSD is the most stable and secure OS on the market right now. The license is more free in alot of people's opinion.
As far as trying it, well I never did get it to work right. If you have spare time then sure why not? Worst case scenario you don't like it and get rid of it.
Ive tried freebsd, desktop bsd and pcbsd, the latter two being free bsd in disguise.
For me free bsd was rock solid and very fast but the package management system was crap. Both desktopbsd and pcbsd improved upon this but only pcbsd seemed to have the good package handler.
If you dont mind fiddling around compiling packages, chasing up dependencies etc then freebsd is your best bet. But remember that linux and bsd are different. There is absolutely no flash for bsd, even worse Nvidia drivers for bsd and all of this sort of thing.
You really become aware how easy Ubuntu is after you try distros like freebsd, arch and others.
sorry I thought that bsd is quicker for networking etc, but just for a desktop environment linux is quicker.
Ok well Im going to try out pcbsd since there is a vmware image download. I can just run it in linux and see if I like it in general :D then again I wont be able to "completely" tests its abilities through vmware, Ill get the general picture ;)
wow this is very nice! then again I dont know what im doing anymore haha. Well I guess vmware is a good tool for learning new os' without having to make any commitment.
But really this is interesting. KDE Desktop by standard too... very nice. However, Its almost a new world (like when I switched from windows to linux) all over again.
yeah I need to play with pc bsd somemore.....I wanna change kde though to fluxbox.....
ok I have gotten ports installed now woot!!!
now for some flux box.... and to learn how to use ports......
It has major, rock-hard, stability over Linux and is a speed demon (Or should I say daemon... Ha! I made a funny!).
FreeBSD is neat from what I've played with it (Minimal, but cool nonetheless).
slimdog360 said: For me free bsd was rock solid and very fast but the package management system was crap.
That's harsh. FreeBSD ports system is pretty good. Nowhere near as easy as apt-get, but calling it crap is way off the mark.
slimdog360 said:
If you dont mind fiddling around compiling packages, chasing up dependencies etc then freebsd is your best bet.
For me FreeBSD was much faster than Ubuntu on the same machine. I also had just about everything working the same minus automounting and Compiz. Compiz and the time spent compiling and fixing dependancy issues are the two reasons I'm using Ubuntu right now.
slimdog360 said:
There is absolutely no flash for bsd, even worse Nvidia drivers for bsd and all of this sort of thing.
I was running Flash 6 and could have used a Linux Firefox with Flash 7 at the time. I don't know, but I would think I could be using the same Firefox and Flash 9 now as I'm using in Ubuntu (with no performance penalty, actually a boost). nVidia supplies the latest drivers natively for FreeBSD. I had newer drivers running on FreeBSD than I had from the Ubuntu repositories.
slimdog360 said:
You really become aware how easy Ubuntu is after you try distros like freebsd, arch and others. That's the reason I'm here, otherwise with more free time I'd be using FreeBSD. Also the format/organization, the attitude and the abundance of support on this forum is greater to me than the mailing lists of FreeBSD.
vayu said:
For me FreeBSD was much faster than Ubuntu on the same machine. I also had just about everything working the same minus automounting and Compiz. Compiz and the time spent compiling and fixing dependancy issues are the two reasons I'm using Ubuntu right now.
It's funny, I don't remember any dependency issues, I think the port system handled these for me, doesn't it?
moving to the BSD forum.
shining said: It's funny, I don't remember any dependency issues, I think the port system handled these for me, doesn't it?
Ports is excellent. I just had troubles after upgrading packages a few times. The ports tree changes over time and after a few upgrades you have to understand a bit more than with apt-get.
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php
...all the answers you need to feed.
I think Linux will overtake FreeBSD in the end because it has a license which enables it to improve and reap the benefits of everyone tinkering with it, the BSD license lets people take the code and make their own proprietry OS out of it, like Apple did abit with Mac OS X.
Linux and BSD are both fun, and hopefully they will steal Windows desktop and server users (respectively) instead of competing against each other.
I installed FreeBSD (I barely knew what I was doing) and got X working decently by some miracle. I'm not quite sure how to configure my ath0 device but I think I found a good howto. I am just doing this because it is fun to mess with an OS that normally doesn't go on a desktop. Even though my sound in net is not yet working, it still beats the crap out of Fedora Core 5 (awful experience--nasty bug that prevented drivers to install). But I will be using Ubuntu for a real attempt at computing unless I become paranoid and want more security.
I found it much easier coming from Linux to PC-BSD, than I found it going from windoze to Ubuntu.
Linux & BSD are similar in many ways, they are also both very different to windoze in similar ways.
The BSD license is far more popular in business because of it's freedom from the complicated GNU licenses. Businesses don't have to fear future litigation & are not forced to GPL their code because they used a GPL component.
I'm not making value judgments, this is just information that I've gathered off the web.
FreeBSD is a very powerful OS. It has a great ports system and is extremely stable, but two of the biggest differences between any *BSD and Linux is the license and the goals. FreeBSD aims for technical excellence, hence it has far better stability and when a driver/update comes out for it, it is fully developed without (m)any holes. Linux, however, is more chaotic, allowing it to grow faster, but at the cost of speed and some stability. FreeBSD probably seems slow or not as good to you because they take pride in making sure everything is perfect in the OS, and, you have to remember, FreeBSD is not a desktop OS. DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are configurations and "branches" of FreeBSD that do a great job at doing this for you, providing an easy-to-use interface, but the projects are still young. Give the FreeBSD desktops a few more years to catch up to linux and there will be some great competition going on.
Also, concerning the licenses, the BSD license is not restricting, it just says, basically: you can use the code from our OS/development, but you are not obligated to share it, just state that you borrowed some of it from us. The GPL license, however, forces companies to provide their code as open source, which some companies do not always want to do.
It is all a matter of taste, but Desktop-ish BSD distros are still young, so give them some time to flourish.
I have used BSD before. I thought it was cool, but people are saying that they like to focus on hardware compatibility and stuff. But I still havnt gotten any internet at all on any BSD kernel, or sound, or graphics (3D). I went through 2 different motherboards with different onboard chipsets and I still continue to have this issue. My motherboard driver disk even has FreeBSD drivers, but after installing them, they never worked, and or activated. Plus I know what I doing with unix systems and I was still unable to make BSD work properly with my drivers. But other than that, I thought it was a neat OS and it's blazingly fast compared to Ubuntu or Fedora. I think Gentoo is the closest in speed to BSD.
Yeah I have gotten around to test other distros and OS'. So far I have not been able to install PCBSD on my system (actually it wouldn't install on any of the 3 I tried, minus one install done thru VMWare). I also tried out Solaris 10, which like OS X, derived off of the BSD core and lisence. But, I can't get any support in Solaris for my Radeon 9250. Everthing was very slow; no dri. Now, I'm running only one OS and it so happens to be Gentoo. Gentoo is BLAZING FAST. However learning it really sucks your productivity and time away from getting the tasks that you need done completed. But, if anyone knows how to get ati card working well in bsd/solaris, please let me know.
WalmartSniperLX said: Yeah I have gotten around to test other distros and OS'. So far I have not been able to install PCBSD on my system (actually it wouldn't install on any of the 3 I tried, minus one install done thru VMWare). I also tried out Solaris 10, which like OS X, derived off of the BSD core and lisence. But, I can't get any support in Solaris for my Radeon 9250. Everthing was very slow; no dri. Now, I'm running only one OS and it so happens to be Gentoo. Gentoo is BLAZING FAST. However learning it really sucks your productivity and time away from getting the tasks that you need done completed. But, if anyone knows how to get ati card working well in bsd/solaris, please let me know.
ATI doesn't offer drivers for either I don't believe. You MIGHT be able to finagle some 3d out of the drivers included in Xorg, but I wouldn't hold my breath. You might try Nexenta (its an OpenSolaris distro). Since its basically a port of Debian onto the OpenSolaris kernel they might have done more with 3d stuff for the desktop.
I've found that freeBSD is more stable but less complete compared to linux.
I have to say I agree with the comment less complete on freeBSD. I shall give it a chance again. But I am tired of being stuck on xterm windows. It just seems harder to get configured. The install step was similar to slackware, but seemingly harder. I believe it would get very good in the near future. The install method was very original to me, but cumbersome. I think I should have downloaded and had the second disc of freebsd 6.2 if I wanted kde of the bat. Seems good though. I would vertainly try em out again when they have their next release. The forum support was very fast and helpful on one of my questions.
I think once one undertands the workings of it, one may really become hooked on it. Alas, Linux is already getting me further in this regard..
WalmartSniperLX said: Ive read a lot about people saying BSD is so much better than linux (mainly because its a real Unix distro).
The major 3 BSDs, Open, Free and Net are *not* 'distros' of BSD. They have different kernels and userland that are not natively executable to each other.
However PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are distros fo FreeBSD, they uses the same kernel and are 'binary compatible'.
Having said that, OpenBSD has have e FreeBSD compatibility layer to run FreeBSD binaries, and other BSDs probably have similar layers... however this is not so much different from Linux compatibility layer to run Linux applications on xBSDs.
neowolf said: I think Linux will overtake FreeBSD in the end because it has a license which enables it to improve and reap the benefits of everyone tinkering with it, the BSD license lets people take the code and make their own proprietry OS out of it, like Apple did abit with Mac OS X.
FUD.
You can't close source a BSD Licensed software, sure, you can make a closed source software from BSD code, but the original codebase doesn't get closed by anyone.
BTW, Apple does not close source FreeBSD, the changes they made to FreeBSD code are freely available known as the Darwin project, and they are being ported back to FreeBSD. FreeBSD and Darwin shares a great number of developers anyway, so Apple does indeed contributes back into FreeBSD project.
WalmartSniperLX said: I also tried out Solaris 10, which like OS X, derived off of the BSD core and lisence.
Not exactly... see this diagram: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2142935#post2142935
You can argue Solaris 10 had a predecessor that have been influence by early versions of BSD, but in no way similar to the way of OS X base off FreeBSD.