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Distro comparison



Warning, i use a FreeBSD desktop. See below.

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 03:29:49PM -0400, David Kramer wrote:
> 
> FreeBSD would be the greatest departure from Red Hat.  It would also offer a 
> cleaner kernel and possibly more efficient operation.  The ports system 
> seems better than RPM's because I hate binary databases for system 
> configuration.  I wish I knew more about FreeBSD, but what I've read about 
> it I like.
> Questions:
> - Are ports for new versions of software generally available soon after
>   release?

Each port is maintained by a person. A "port maintainer". It really just
depends on how fast they are, and how much time they have to work on the
new port. Most often though, they are pretty quick. Pick a current app
you're interested in, and check their site and see what version they are
at to compare. check this: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi

> - How different is it to maintain than Linux?

Very. Upgrading and patching a bsd system involves some understanding of
different cvs tags and using cvs/cvsup to manage a local src repository.
For example, if there's a patch for $foo for FreeBSD, you get a src diff
from them, apply it to a local copy of the src, then rebuild that
application. There is no rpm -Uvh new-patched-version for things that
come with the OS. For ports, there is portsupgrade though. 

Luckily, the docs are great and its not that hard to pick up really with
good docs.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

> - Is all the talk about extra security and stability a bunch of crap?  I
>   know it certainly used to be true, but is it still true?

There are generally less patches per release. And generally dramatic
changes don't happen very often. So, in a sense, it can be scene as more
secure and stable. However, thats certianly a matter for debate (i.e.
flame wars)

> 
> Note: I really liked the talk about Gentoo at the last meeting.  There are 
> two reasons I don't think it's for me though.
> - My server is my mail server, so I cannot have it down for half a day while 
> it compiles and downloads things from the internet.
> - While I much prefer text config files to binary ones, there are certain
>   config files which are very hard to do by hand, like X11 configuration.  I
>   don't know that I would want to go with a distro that had no tools to help
>   with config files like that one.

All of the issues you have with trying Gentoo, apply to FreeBSD as well.

So if you wouldn't consider Gentoo, FreeBSD may be a bad choice.





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