Linux vs. BSD?

[Jason Stephenson]

Theo is a nut.....There, I said it. I got that off my chest. ;)

That said, I do use OpenBSD for my homebrew routers, and he makes a few 
good points.

I have used and continue to use in some capacity FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and 
various flavors of GNU/Linux: Red Hat 6.x, 7.x, 8.0, 9.0, FC3, RHEL; 
Slackware 4.0, 7.0, 9.1; Debian, several releases and even a machine 
that had a mix of packages from 2 releases. I've also administered many 
commercial Unix systems: HP-UX, Solaris 7 through 9, IRIX, and had the 
"pleasure" of briefly working with (against?) a system running a very 
old release of OSF/1.

At home, I have a laptop with Red Hat 8 on it, my workstation with 
FreeBSD 5.4, a web and email server with FreeBSD 5.4, and my internet 
router/firewall with OpenBSD.--I'm thinking about installing FreeBSD on 
the laptop before going on a trip this summer, too.

In my opinion, there are places where the BSDs, and FreeBSD in 
particular, are technically superior to Linux. There are also places, 
such as suport for NUMA and very large scale SMP, where Linux is 
superior to the BSDs. I can tell you there are situations where I'd 
choose Linux and others where I'd choose one of the BSDs. The criteria 
vary with each situation, and I'm not going to draw a hard line like Theo.

For my personal use, I prefer FreeBSD. As a programmer and 
administrator, I like the fact that configuration is done through a 
well-organized set of text files.

I also tend to install most packages from source rather than from binary 
package files. The ports system on FreeBSD (and the other BSDs as well) 
makes this very easy. I don't usually inspect the source code for every 
package that I install, but I do always look through the ports Makefiles 
for configurable options. In the case of some packages, I'll even go so 
far as to modify the Makefiles to install stuff in an alternate 
location, or to change the default choices. In many cases, you don't 
have to do this, but in some, you do.

For my current hardware and situation, it's largely a question of style. 
I know that GNU/Linux would perform adequately on all of my current 
systems at home. I prefer the BSD way of doing things for my own computers.

At work, we have a couple Solaris boxes and the other 'nix systems are 
running GNU/Linux. I decided that GNU/Linux would be the better choice 
for that environment given the technical abilities of the other staff 
and the fact that the mail server was already running GNU/Linux when I 
got there.

Apart from a couple of very specific problem domains, the main reason 
that I see for going with one OS over another is largely a question of 
style, and how you work.

Cheers,
Jason