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I like that old adage. I actually had never heard it. I think BSD's success with i386 has brought the stark pragmatism of the "server" to the PC. The dream o

by gwu78 13y ago

I like that old adage. I actually had never heard it. I think BSD's success with i386 has brought the stark pragmatism of the "server" to the PC. The dream of BSDI. The reliability, robustness and the uniformity. Maybe BSD UNIX is not as "fun" as MS and Apple, but it _works_ the best. Relatively minimal bloat. And things can be removed relatively easily. Getting small is not frowned upon or ignored as a worthy objective. "The hero is the negative coder." (credit: Doug McIlroy, one of the original UNIX developers) Linux OTOH (a horde of wannabe kernel hackers and a gazillion idiosyncratic GNU programs) has brought the chaos of the PC[1] to the idea of "UNIX". There is bloat and endless tweaking around every corner. The vigilance and skill it takes to make your Linux small and simple and actually keep it that way is, IME, quite the burden. The respect for the user also differs. Man pages? I guess the assumption is we'll just read the code when we have a question. But then there's also an expectation we'll use binary packages. Linux just makes my head spin. I'm just not smart enough to use it. I wish I was... because they have better hardware support. Based on what I've seen, I doubt many a Linux developer would think "The hero is the negative coder." Linux just keeps growing and becoming more complex and unwieldy. And so by comparison, IMO, Linux less embodies the idea of UNIX than BSD. 1. The Windows experience of constantly searching for some non-MS program to do some task that base Windows itself can't even begin to handle... and you end up with an ad hoc mess of programs that barely do what you need, and most of them poorly written by who knows who.

Ologn 13y ago
I had an appreciation for FreeBSD. They were smart about some things. Especially circa 1996 era. It was an easy install. Pop in a 3.5" disk and do a network install. It had drivers and automagic support for obscure ethernet cards which Linux did not support at that time. It even had an easy modem install. When I needed a small server quick I'd buy a PC from a store, pop a disk in it and network install FreeBSD. Get up a DNS, mail or web server in no time. Making the install process easy can help an OS get out there a lot. The servers were sturdy and good too. A nice ports system for applications - better than dpkg or rpm at the time. It just worked. The install itself was a thing of beauty - no hassles. FreeBSD 1996 beats Gentoo 2013 in that department. As far as bloat, some BSDs are more elegant, but I do not think Linux is that bloated. It is small enough to succeed on embedded systems and Androids. The device driver section is bloated, but the core system is not as bad. Yes, Ubuntu is not small and simple, but Debian is if you want it to be.
- lmm 13y ago
  It was an easy install as long as you didn't mind wiping your whole hard disk. Many people tried Linux first because they could do that without having to blow away Windows, and then stayed there.
- gwu78 13y ago
  "It is small enough to succeed on embedded systems and Androids.' Right. (In fact, it can succeed anywhere. And it does.) But my point is that it's not _presented to the user_ in a form that makes reducing it to embeddable size or porting it to ARM easy. I compile my BSD systems from source. And small modifications are (compared to Linux) easy. Linux From Scratch (LFS) and Busybox were the closest I saw to what I was looking for. But when you look at the Linux ecosystem, LFS seems so obscure. And how many people create their own customized Busybox? To pursue these objectives with Linux feels like moving against the grain. No one aims to assist you by making the system easy to comprehend and modify. The people I see modifying Linux at the level I would want to modify it are just too far beyond my comfort level with C and assembly. I can't do what they do and believe my system will still be reliable. Not only that, it would take forever to do it. I'm just not smart enough to use Linux. As I said above, it's just too much work.

by gwu78 13y ago

Ologn 13y ago

I had an appreciation for FreeBSD. They were smart about some things. Especially circa 1996 era. It was an easy install. Pop in a 3.5" disk and do a network install. It had drivers and automagic support for obscure ethernet cards which Linux did not support at that time. It even had an easy modem install. When I needed a small server quick I'd buy a PC from a store, pop a disk in it and network install FreeBSD. Get up a DNS, mail or web server in no time. Making the install process easy can help an OS get out there a lot. The servers were sturdy and good too. A nice ports system for applications - better than dpkg or rpm at the time. It just worked. The install itself was a thing of beauty - no hassles. FreeBSD 1996 beats Gentoo 2013 in that department. As far as bloat, some BSDs are more elegant, but I do not think Linux is that bloated. It is small enough to succeed on embedded systems and Androids. The device driver section is bloated, but the core system is not as bad. Yes, Ubuntu is not small and simple, but Debian is if you want it to be.

lmm 13y ago
It was an easy install as long as you didn't mind wiping your whole hard disk. Many people tried Linux first because they could do that without having to blow away Windows, and then stayed there.
gwu78 13y ago
"It is small enough to succeed on embedded systems and Androids.' Right. (In fact, it can succeed anywhere. And it does.) But my point is that it's not _presented to the user_ in a form that makes reducing it to embeddable size or porting it to ARM easy. I compile my BSD systems from source. And small modifications are (compared to Linux) easy. Linux From Scratch (LFS) and Busybox were the closest I saw to what I was looking for. But when you look at the Linux ecosystem, LFS seems so obscure. And how many people create their own customized Busybox? To pursue these objectives with Linux feels like moving against the grain. No one aims to assist you by making the system easy to comprehend and modify. The people I see modifying Linux at the level I would want to modify it are just too far beyond my comfort level with C and assembly. I can't do what they do and believe my system will still be reliable. Not only that, it would take forever to do it. I'm just not smart enough to use Linux. As I said above, it's just too much work.