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It's basically a "Why would you choose Arch over Ubuntu?"-type of question. Is there a long list of objective reasons why someone might prefer one or the other?
by arp242 4y ago
It's basically a "Why would you choose Arch over Ubuntu?"-type of question. Is there a long list of objective reasons why someone might prefer one or the other? Not really. They just do things in a different way.
That said, better hardware and software support is definitely an advantage of Linux; but if your hardware supports FreeBSD and you don't want any Linux-specific software that FreeBSD's Linux emulation can't run then most of the time it's just a matter of preference; the platforms have converged quite a lot over the last 20 years – the differences were more substantial in the past.
I'm not sure what you mean with "BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers"; WiFi has been supported for a very long time, and back in the day when WiFi sucked on any non-Windows platform OpenBSD was the trailblazer in this area.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago> BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers If anything, BSD generally seems more centralized and batteries included than Linux, so it would be the first to have Wi-Fi drivers, going by philosophical stereotype.
- arp242 4y agoNot necessarily; certainly traditionally Linux tended to merge things when it's "good enough" whereas BSD tended to merge things when it was "rock solid". There's something to be said for both approaches and both have their own advantages and disadvantages. These days Linux tends to be a bit conservative though, and it's not the same project it was 20 years ago. Theodore Ts'o posted something interesting on this a few years ago: P.S. There is yet another example of "Worse is Better" in how Linux had PCMCIA support several years before FreeBSD/NetBSD. However, if you ejected a PCMCiA card in a Linux system, there was a chance (in practice it worked out to be about in 1 in 5 times for a WiFI card, in my experience) that the system would crash. The BSD's took a good 2-3 years longer to get PCMCIA support, but when they did, it was rock solid. Of course, if you are a laptop user, and are happy to keep your 802.11 PCMCIA card permanently installed, guess which OS you were likely to prefer --- "sloppy but works, mostly", or "it'll get there eventually, and will be rock solid when it does, but zip, nada, right now"?* https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/011552.html https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/011552.html
- sam_bristow 4y agoAny idea how the Linux implementation fared 2-3 years after that initial release? Did those rough edges get cleaned up?
- arp242 4y agoI don't know; I never used it myself. I always assumed it did, but PCMCIA Wi-Fi was around for a relatively short period and saw relatively little usage so maybe not.