Although nearly all of the public focus is geared around advocacy of Linux and Windows, there is a third Intel based operating system, which generates a tiny fraction of the publicity surrounding these operating systems, and has a much smaller user and developer community. FreeBSD secured a strong foothold with the hosting and internet services communities at the genesis of the web and has anything but gone away. Indeed it is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey, Netcraft says.
Nearly 2 Million Active Sites Running FreeBSD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Glad to see their growing in use.
Representing Cumberland, BC, Canada – I run FreeBSD on my domain.
i may be a Linux user and all 😛 but it’s great to see another *nix (and a excellent one at that) doing well and getting more use in the wider world.
The header of this article says that Windows, Linux and FreeBSD are the only ones gaining users (and presumably marketshare). Does this mean that NetBSD and OpenBSD are losing the size of their install base. I can begin to understand how this may be true for NetBSD but OpenBSD’s position seems so secure (excuse the pun). Does anyone have any figures to back up this implicit claim that NetBSD and OpenBSD are losing their install base?
To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system used by so many been administered by so few.
FreeBSD does something wonderful, they provide a stable while also easy to use way to customize aspects of the programs you are compiling before compiling them and let them be treated as packages within the system. You can build custom packages then easily deploy them across a number of systems. I will, however, keep in mind that similar functionality could be achieved by Gentoo or Debian, to appease our Linux zealot friends.
Now, the issue turns to virtual server spaces being sold which run a virtual instance of FreeBSD. I see virtual server instaces on FreeBSD being sold all the time, on places like http://www.n-vision.com/
FreeBSD’s init system is wonderful for environments like this. I keep seeing more and more virtual server instance sellers who are selling FreeBSD. One reason I’ve been told is that components such as the VMM and scheduler aren’t quite as CPU hungry as in other operating systems, and also that the memory footprint is quite low. This bodes quite well for virtual server environments.
At any rate, go FreeBSD! My servers will continue running you until the day I leave my job or I’m fired, and hopefully much much after that when they can’t hire someone to take my place…
Someone had to say it.
Better as a joke than a troll.
it would be intersting to see when the first ever posting of that was, no doubt it was on something like slashdot.
As for linux zealots, well plenty of *BSD zealots about as well. What we really need is just *nix zealots instead 😉
I think I have already posted something in the same subject line. I know it may sound immature et al… I just couldn’t find anything else to say about FreeBSD.
…. is free *nix success too.
i’m a linux user but i’m happy for freebsd.
Perhaps OpenBSD firewalls and weird devices driven by NetBSD are all on the increase. This article is in regards to webservers.
There are things I hate in *BSDs: they have no interest in make easier installation and they have no interest in desktop use. OK, these systems are good and stable but linux is becoming rapidly more powerfull and it is much more flexible than all *BSDs (I can use it on many platforms, there are desktop-friendly versions and with easy-installers, linux have more hardware support, etc).
*BSD generally are faster out of the box compared to most linux distros except of course distros like gentoo, etc. As they are more geared towards servers, setup is very text based.
The only thing I don’t like about *BSD is their upgrade paths, the best way to upgrade is to do a complete wipe out and reinstall which Linux distro like debian has an advantage over.
So it’s really up to your individual tastes….
> There are things I hate in *BSDs: they have no
> interest in make easier installation and they have no
> interest in desktop use.
Easy installation is something that I agree to be important. Installation that is easy for someone who’s never had to go without a mouse before is not something I see as important. The *BSDs aren’t designed for newbies. Having no interest in desktop use is precisely what makes these OSs soo useful to their users. If you don’t like using the command line, don’t troll on newsgroups saying that you hate the *BSDs or any other unfortunate operating system that you might happen to find.
> OK, these systems are good and stable but linux is
> becoming rapidly more powerfull and it is much more
> flexible than all *BSDs
Describing Linux as being more powerful and flexible are two very subjective arguments and ones I strongly disagree with. Linux lacks Mandatory Access Control. An important security feature. Ext3 and ReiserFS are slow and have a large overhead compared to FreeBSD’s soft updates, particularly with UFS2.
As for flexible, Linux in no way allows you to have access to as many applications with such great ease as what the ports system (across all *BSDs) provides. cd /usr/ports/category/appname && make install clean. Could it be any easier. Of course, Gentoo and Debian have systems with similar abilities but these features aren’t standard across all distros. Hence, writing an application that will run on all distros is a nightmare. A nightmare that LSB doesn’t help much. It doesn’t allow the use of enough libraries to allow a feeling of unrestricted development.
> (I can use it on many platforms, there are
> desktop-friendly versions and with easy-installers,
> linux have more hardware support, etc).
You can use NetBSD on more than 50 platforms. OpenBSD on 10 and FreeBSD on 6. Linux is only supported on 5-6 anyway, hence, your platform support argument doesnt stand. As for being desktop friendly. To quote Theo de Raadt, “OpenBSD wasn’t written for children”. The same applies for all of the *BSDs but FreeBSD combats this to a certain extent. Hardware support of FreeBSD is very close to being on par with Linux. For example, FreeBSD was the first open source OS to support wireless networking via 802.11a and 802.11g. Take a look at the hardware compatibility list for i386 here:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.8R/hardware-i386.html
Actually, my experiences (at least concerning FreeBSD) are the opposite. FreeBSD, by default, has several things turned off that affect performance. It is, out of the box, very conservative and needs to be tuned to bring up the performance.
BSD installation, with the sole exception of NetBSD, is fairly easy to do in my experience. OpeBSD is barebones but straight forward, FreeBSD reminds me of the text installs of Slackware or Red Hat from the 5.x series and earlier. Not point n click, but not brain surgery either. NetBSD? Ugh….and I thought Solaris was a bastard to install. Its the disk partitioning part, it took me **an hour** before I figured out what they hell they wanted from me. Look, I’ve been installing Unixen on my PCs since roughly 1998 with my purchase of Red Hat 5.1 – I understand disk partioning, making a swap file, etc etc. Why make it freaking difficult? It was that that has kept me from fully exploring NetBSD, which is a shame – I’m still interested in it.
“OK, these systems are good and stable”
Very much so. Indeed, stability when compared against Linux is a great sticking point – in their favour. For one of the most prominent examples, just take a look at the history of the 2.4 VM. The VM in the Linux kernel was reknowned for being wildly unstable until long into the “stable” 2.4 tree, as evidenced by the fact that Linus eventually scrapped it and replaced it wholesale rather than try to fix the thing. Against the vehement protests of a fair number of the other lead kernel devs, most notably Alan Cox, too.
> The only thing I don’t like about *BSD is their upgrade paths, the
> best way to upgrade is to do a complete wipe out and reinstall
> which Linux distro like debian has an advantage over.
Complete wipe out & reinstall? I don’t think so.. atleast not with FreeBSD (haven’t tried the others).. cvsup the latest sources & then..
cd /usr/src
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL
make installkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL
shutdown now
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
simple as that.
“There are things I hate in *BSDs: they have no interest in make easier installation and they have no interest in desktop use. OK, these systems are good and stable but linux is becoming rapidly more powerfull and it is much more flexible than all *BSDs (I can use it on many platforms, there are desktop-friendly versions and with easy-installers, linux have more hardware support, etc).”
“The only thing I don’t like about *BSD is their upgrade paths, the best way to upgrade is to do a complete wipe out and reinstall which Linux distro like debian has an advantage over.”
These quoted posts are prime examples why this site needs moderating. Trolling or just plain pathetically uninformed messages could be easily avoided reading without restricting freedom of speech.
> These quoted posts are prime examples why this site
> needs moderating. Trolling or just plain pathetically
> uninformed messages could be easily avoided
> reading without restricting freedom of speech.
If you’d read many of the other threads at this site you’d understand that there is some modding down done here. However, its usually quotes even more hopeless or “pathetically uninformed” as you say.
Comments such as “DIE MICROSOFT!!! YOU S**K”, “I told you apple were dying, LONG LIVE LINUX!!!!” or “ALL YOU LINUX BABIES GET A LIFE” are more likely candidates for being modded down than the ones you just mentioned.
BTW, this discussion is offtopic. If you want to voice your opinion to someone, you should try mailing:
(david)-or-(eugenia)@osnews.com
I think I will try out BSD next year, but Linux is doing well right now and I want to run the 2.6 kernel as well as support the progress of Gnome and Kde and MySQL, and all of the other projects. Linux has never been more popular. It continues to expand, especially outside of North America. I can barely manage to keep up with all of the events related to Linux, however if BSD becomes popular, hopefully they will be able to get along better with Linux than Microsoft does.
Just my opinion on this….
Once FreeBSD gets itself a native JDK/JRE environment that is made available at the same time as the Windows, Solaris, and the Linux versions, that’s when I think FreeBSD will get a larger slice of the pie.
“These … posts are prime examples why this site needs moderating. Trolling or just plain pathetically uninformed messages could be easily avoided reading without restricting freedom of speech.”
They are probably just ill informed not trolls. The posts are usefull for freeBSD enthusiasts to reply and show the world where such posts are wrong. I am a Linux user but they seemed wrong from what I have read about freeBSD, not yet having tried it. But it is usefull to hear from the horses mouth of experienced users the real situation.
I am pleased by the growth of any and all free Unix like operating systems. I am in favour of *nix solidarity against the illegal monopoly.
…scarily enough. Especially since someone smarter than me finally managed to cook up a working SoundBlaster Audigy driver. I never did manage to get the one I hacked together working.
I’m a fairly experienced user, and a programmer by trade, so setting up FreeBSD wasn’t extremely difficult, although was more frustrating in a few ways. For example, my hostname is dynamically assigned along with my IP address. FreeBSD by default isn’t setup to handle a dynamic hostname. I had to hack together a shell script to use awk to extract my IP from the ifconfig information and then set the hostname to whatever host returned for the IP, and then spent a while figuring out where to put that script so it would run at the right point during startup, which I eventually discovered was /usr/local/etc/rc.d
I also had to manually disable the normal /etc/rc.d/hostname script from running during it’s normal spot because it usually assigns a static hostname before the network interface is initialized. Which obviously doesn’t work for me since my hostname is dynamically assigned. Yes, I did try many different things with the configuration of dhclient, and spent several hours reading documentation on the web to no avail.
FreeBSD 5.1 definitely performs more responsively from what I can tell. No hard numbers on that. The system just “feels” very smooth in execution, etc. Almost all of the bizarre kernel panics I had in 5.0 are gone as well.
I got mpg123 working at the command line interface in freebsd5.1, not hard at all. Was listening to shoutcast the other day. Alt+F2 and a new console and I am surfing with links. Alt+F3 and i do a scan of windows for viruses with f-prot. alt+F4 and i’m running distributed folding.
I tried the advice I received a few days ago to get video at the command line using mplayer compiled with sdl and almost got it going. got vo and vop output errors. need to study more.
can some one please tell me how to drop back down to the command line interface from xwindows (i’m using kdm) without rebooting.
yes I see plenty of apps available in the ports collection and I hope some body gets electricsheep up to speed. Mr Draves ( draves.org ) has made some neat advances in the last months for linux and “cough” windows.
“The VM in the Linux kernel was reknowned for being wildly unstable until long into the “stable” 2.4 tree, as evidenced by the fact that Linus eventually scrapped it and replaced it wholesale rather than try to fix the thing.”
I personally don’t agree with this. My Company has run their webservers off the 2.4.x series since 2.4.0 or 2.4.1, we’ve never really had any stability issues to speak of with the Kernel itself. Now stability issues with Apache, Oracle, or XFS…that’s a different story :]
DISCLAIMER: I’m a FreeBSD 5.1 user at home :]
Great. 🙂 I guess your company was lucky. Plus, the problems tended to get worse with longer uptimes IIRC, so if your company servers were often crashing for other reasons as you say, it’s perfectly possible that your company wouldn’t have noticed any problems with the VM.
Just to show that I’m not arguing purely from my own subjective experience (I really should have provided a link in the first place, pardon the omission) check http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,140541,00.asp for a nice overview of the whole VM fiasco.
Regarding the stability of the old VM:
—
Arcangeli, the author of the new VM, wrote in an e-mail that the previous VM “was falling apart. It was running very slow, generating swap storms, and often, it needed a long uptime to trigger the problem. It was just not good enough.”
—
As the article clearly shows, the two most senior kernel developers, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, were both in wholehearted agreement with the above statement. However, they differed in their views of how the situation should be dealt with. And here we come to the crux of the issue:
It’s terribly bad practice to introduce such a major change in the middle of what is supposed to be the stable kernel series. That is likewise not only my opinion; the link above also mentions how Alan Cox maintained the old VM in his own kernel tree for quite some time in protest.
The issue’s water under the bridge now, thank goodness, but it’ll still serve as cannon-fodder for the critics of the Linux kernel development process for some time to come, and deservedly so (IMO).
Oh, and just for the record, I use Debian myself. 🙂
can some one please tell me how to drop back down to the command line interface from xwindows (i’m using kdm) without rebooting.
The following should work for you…
From a terminal window or a virtual console:
killall kdm
Hope that helps.
To fall back to the commandline from X hit `Alt+F*` where * is the tearminal you are wanting to fall back to( IE: ttyv0-ttyv* ). As for commandline video play back try ‘mplayer -vo aa only movie.mpg`, notice the – before the vo. That should help …..
Actually, Alt-F1 usually won’t work from inside XWindows. You need to use Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or F*). Or Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. 😉
Probably the easiest thing to do, besides using the Alt+Fn key to get to a virtual console, would be to not use KDM, GDM or XDM. I boot into a standard console. If I want to use X, I type “startx”. This works in Linux and the *BSD’s. For the vast majority of the things I do at home, I don’t need X, and find the console to be much simpler.
And Ctrl-Alt-Backspace only works if you’re not using a display manager if i remember correctly. Otherwise it just logs you out of kdm, xdm, gdm, or whatever else you use.
Sorry that was a brain fart that should have read Ctl+Alt+F*
As a Linux user I bow my head in respect to FreeBSDs achievements.
Ehre wem Ehre gebuehrt.
(Honor to those who deserve it.)
(Currently running FreeBSD 5.1 and Debian 3.01)
Oh god please! That’s such an old silly gripe. “Boo-hoo, it’s not easy enough to install, boo-hoo. And I have yet to find out how it can wipe my butt too. boo-hoo”
That’s probably very immature of me to say that, but geez people. It’s really not that hard. The installer (sysinstall) is simple and gets you up and running quickly.
Since you people always want to comapare it to Linux, have you ever tried installing Debian Linux? The installer is quite similar. Have you every tried installing Gentoo Linux? I don’t think that even has an installer. At least not one that I can remember. It’s been awhile.
As far as the whole desktop thing, FreeBSD can pretty much do most of what Linux can do on the desktop. It can run GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and plain old window managers. It can play DVD’s, MPEG’s, OGG Vorbise, and MP3’s. It runs Mozilla, Opera, and can even run email software such as KMail and Evolution. So, where’s the problem?
Okay, so Linux might have a bit more hardware support but I think my life will go on just fine without a webcam.
Basically, what I’m saying is that you really need to be more creative when coming up with excuses on why not to use FreeBSD. The whole installation program and desktop gripe is pretty played out. And the way I see it, it’s a non-issue.
FreeBSD is stable, secure, and fast and that’s why it’s heavily used as a server Operating system. ‘Nuff said.
try ctrl-alt-f1 (or f2, or f3, etc)
Then to get back to XWindows you can hit Alt-F7 or F8 I forgot which because I change the number of virtual terminals in my /etc/ttys.
For my daily work, I use NetBSD, and the main reason that I use it, is that it does not have kernel modules (so all hardware works automatically) and still has quite a large packages collection.
Another disadvantage of FreebSD, in my eyes, was that the kernel loader hints are documented nowhere, because that would be too much work, according to the handbook. It also really messes up my harddisk, I can’t use DMA, otherwise constantly DMA write timeouts. My IDE controller is a little bit non-standard, you know.
But on the other hand, for the desktop (yes, the magic word 😉 FreeBSD felt much more responsive – scrolling in Konqueror goes much slower under NetBSD than under FreeBSD here.
For the rest, NetBSD has crashed for me twice, probably being a conflict between my soundcard and the harddisk, because of the wrong DMA implementation of the latter. However, Linux has a workaround for this, documented and well.
I type this from Windows indeed, had to convert a Paint Shop Pro picture from an NTFS-disk. But besides that, I am happily using NetBSD, with my USB Zipdrive, USB memory card reader and my USB drawing tablet happily working for me.
I have been a linux user. I have switched between Redhat and Mandrake over the years and tried to get the most out of both worlds (desktop and server) from Linux. However, one day, I tried FreeBSD. At first, I didn’t “get” how sysinstall works. But after a few servers, I could not believe how in world did this installer confuse me on my first few tries. It is veeerrryy simple. All is a breeze to configure. I have to say that there is no such thing yet as a “best of both worlds” *nix. Now, I use Windows for the desktop and FreeBSD (exclusively and extensively) for servers. I saluted linux and bid it farewell for now. I am happy. 🙂
i did the “mplayer -vo aa only x.mpg” and it worked but poorly. The play resulted in a display that looked akin to the matrix screensaver with text flowing about. Behind this tripy text display I could see dimly the shadows of the video’s content. I’m guessing I may need to include instructions on the display size in the command. thanks for the help guys/gals on the ctrl+alt+F* tip also.
There are things I hate in *BSDs: they have no interest in make easier installation
Of course they do. The problem is simply that no one is stepping up to the required work. Simple as that. Besides, if they became to easy to install, they’d lose some of their ‘more alternative than thou’ user base
Linux lacks Mandatory Access Control.
Not true. It’s there for those who want it.
Ext3 and ReiserFS are slow and have a large overhead compared to FreeBSD’s soft updates, particularly with UFS2.
Really? Where might I find that data?
As for flexible, Linux in no way allows you to have access to as many applications with such great ease as what the ports system (across all *BSDs) provides.
You seem to be under the impression that the BSDs are sharing the same ports collection. Not so. While FreeBSD sports somewhere around 9k ports, NetBSD has only about a third of that. I’m not sure about OpenBSD.
cd /usr/ports/category/appname && make install clean. Could it be any easier.
Yes.
Of course, Gentoo and Debian have systems with similar abilities but these features aren’t standard across all distros.
So what? If you run Debian you run Debian, and if you run Gentoo you run Gentoo, and you don’t have to care what these other distributions are doing, just as a FreeBSD user doesn’t have to care what ports system NetBSD or OpenBSD uses. That’s the whole point of a ports/package system in the first place!
You can use NetBSD on more than 50 platforms.
Of course, NetBSD counts platforms whereas Linux only counts CPU architectures. For instance support for Amiga, Atari, 68k based Macs, and 68k based Suns are counted as seperate platforms by NetBSD, but as a single port on Linux.
…and FreeBSD on 6.
FreeBSD 4.x only runs on ia32 and alpha, while 5.x runs on sparc64 and ia64 as well.
Linux is only supported on 5-6 anyway
Yet strangely enough, Debian Woody supports 11 different architectures: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
hence, your platform support argument doesnt stand.
There are a number of handheld and high-end platforms where Linux has a presence and NetBSD does not. That’s mostly because the people doing the hardware are also doing the porting.
I have been using FreeBSD and Linux for several years. I began with RedHat, Suse and the Mandrake. Then I tried FreeBSD.
RedHat and Mandrake are really easy to install but after a while you’ll find that many things just don’t work the way they should. The graphical interfaces for configuration didn’t always work the way they should and changing the script manually was complicated. Beneath the shiny surface I soon realized the the free versions of RedHat and Mandrake where not real operating systems but patch works of untested modules. They are both difficult to upgrade.
FreeBSD on the other side is still very easy to install and it is a full and very mature operating system. The config files are easy to understand. About all GNU programs that come with Linux are either ported to FreeBSD or they will compile in native mode.
I first installed FreeBSD as a firewall for my home network. It soon became my main work station. It runs great with KDE3.1.2 . It find it more user friendly that Windoze and even MacOS 9 (I haven’t use X yet) . The only problem I have are with Java, Flash and the sound support required a kernel compile and I can only use one sound source at the time.
I also use FreeBSD on a web server. It works fine. I upgraded it about 5 times remotely. However you have to check the new config files manually and if you don’t, you can lock yourself out.
The only Linux distribution I still use is Debian. The install is user unfriendly. If you are a beginner you don’t know which files to install the choice is almost too large but once it is installed it is so easy to maintain and to upgrade. You just need to install it once.
At this moment, FreeBSD has about 9500 ports (see the graph on their website).
I just counted the amount of packages available on my NetBSD system: 4037
Looking at the growth graph on Netbsd.org, OpenBSD seems to have always had about the half to 2/3 of the amount of NetBSD.
So what? If you run Debian you run Debian, and if you run Gentoo you run Gentoo, and you don’t have to care what these other distributions are doing, just as a FreeBSD user doesn’t have to care what ports system NetBSD or OpenBSD uses. That’s the whole point of a ports/package system in the first place!
The point is here that FreeBSD is one Operating System, and that all applications that are compiled for “freeBSD” work on every FreeBSD system.
With Linux on the other hand, a program compiled for “Linux” will not always work on every Linux system, because there are so many distributions. Even when two systems have the same hardware, and the same kernel version, they might not be able to install eachother’s apps because they are packages differently (rpm, deb or tgz) and/or the packages they depend on have different names. This is not so with FreeBSD.
I worked on linux about 1 year and a half. I tried RedHat, Mandrake, Corel and Caldera. The best for my needs was RedHat. Sure, a was a newcomer from Windows World. Linux simply seems perfect for me…..until I installed FreeBSD.
After about 2 years using FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I really like these systems. Some advantages over Linux?
*It feels very speedy, comparing with linux. There are some benchmarks and all that bunch of proofs. But it doesn’t matters. Only matters how _you_feel_the_system_. And it seems work _very_fast.
*All the tools and utils really works and do that it would do. It means, /stand/sysinstall _really_ works. No wizards, no pretty GUI config tools. But all the remain command tools (MAKEDEV, vi, ifcnfig) and /stand/sysinstall _really_works. (there are no crappy wizards that doesn’t work anyway)
*The kernel is much easier to compile than linux. Really. If you like recompile kernel and you came from Linux camp, this is a must_do. I can see now why compiling the kernel is not seen as a barrier in *BSD World.
*You have all the tools that you use in linux. KDE? Gnome? Nautilus? Xfree? The ports system is the best package and software install system that I ever seen.
*Security. In *bsd you have security levels built-in. By default, *bsd is more secure than linux. Proofs? What about the last bugs in Netfilter on Linux?
*Consistency: If you wanna config wireless interfaces, you not have to use that weird commands as in linux. You simply use ifconfig!!
*In *BSD doesn’t matters to rule the world. Neither have a system that a big enterprise want. The main reason for *BSD is to have a system suitable for all our needs.
And that’s all. That are the main reasons why am using *BSD.
( ultimately it makes me smile while i’m using it. I have ALL under really_true_control)
BSDero
“Linux” is not an operating system. It’s just a kernel. Hence, the existence of the distributions. From http://www.debian.org – “Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer.” Take note: the term “Operating System” is referring not to Linux, but to the amalgam of all the packages within the Debian tree.
“The point is here that FreeBSD is one Operating System, and that all applications that are compiled for “freeBSD” work on every FreeBSD system.”
And the point is that Debian is one Operating System, and that all applications that are compiled for “Debian” work on every Debian system.
Therefore, all the confusion on this issue is due to sloppy thinking. (Yes, I know that I myself have used Linux as a generic term, but I understand that on a *technical* level it’s not an OS.) People don’t expect ports for one of the BSDs to (necessarily) build successfully on one of the others. Why should users of one Linux distribution (whoops, sorry, Operating System 😉 *expect* packages from another distro to necessarily work on their own? I’m not saying that it’s not preferable that they should, especially from the user’s perspective, any less than it would be nice for all of the FreeBSD ports to automatically build on OpenBSD. I’m just saying that in both cases, it’s unrealistic.
To be fair, interoperability between the distributions is getting better all the time. For instance, on my Debian Unstable system I can alien-ize an RPM package with reasonable certainty that it will work on my system. If upon execution the app complains about missing files, http://packages.debian.org will allow me to search to see what package contains them. And if after that the package *still* doesn’t work, there’s always the source; it’s less convenient, for sure, but any technically-minded user should be able to cope just fine. And a user who *can’t* cope probably won’t be installing packages from outside of his chosen distro’s official tree, anyway.
But I honestly doubt there’ll ever be 100% interoperability, or anything like it. The LSB and similar *can’t* be too over-reaching, as distros won’t want to sacrifice that degree of control over their own direction. Whilst standarding on a filesystem layout is admirable, for example, standardising on library versions would be folly. For instance, whilst RedHat might eagerly embrace a new library upon release, Debian is likely to be more conservative in its adoption. About 2 years behind, actually, given its release cycle. 🙂 [Only talking about the Stable branch here] Who gets to decide which approach is “right”, and then who gets to enforce that decision?
I forget this: The doc ever works. No bargain doc that only works in Debian or in redhat…. In *BSD the docs are the better…
BSDero
of personal preference. some people like the GNU/Linux way, some like the FreeBSD way. deal with it. don’t argue about it. everyone’s been over all these points many times.
“some people like the GNU/Linux way, some like the FreeBSD way.”
Geez, talk about stating the obvious…
“don’t argue about it. everyone’s been over all these points many times.”
That may be, but as long as the discussion doesn’t descend to the level of a flame-fest, I don’t see what the harm is. Discourse of this kind is fun (I think so, at least); no-one said that all the contributions have to be original. If you don’t like it, don’t take part.