i'm going to have to agree, i also love them both. Competative motivation definitly helps too, as long as we dont waste too much time flaming eachother ^_^ (which is such a time waster). Too bad most BSD and linux users didn't see things that way, instead of the usual "well blah blah's better then your blah blah". It's about time we get those teamwork game faces on, and do the 'world domination' thing together ;)

I absolutely agree with you, I am so sick of the flame wars, it should be friendly competition! If FreeBSD is the best, we all win, if Linux is the best, we all win. We still have freedom, do we not? And really, they're both unix(-like), so it's not like there's all that much left to flame over considering all the recent improvements. I think they will overall be equal (each better in different areas) and if not, it's still good for everyone. Variety is the spice of life anyhow.

As for flame wars, how many really develop between the core developers of Linux and BSD? I seem to recall one of the BSD VM hackers reviewing the Linux VM, comparing it point for point to the more mature (at the time) BSD VM. The luser Linux zealots may have taken it defensively, but the Linux VM hackers ate it right up and learned from it. For the developers, it was a positive experience on both sides of the fence.

There's been similar sharing of brain cycles comparing soft updates to journaling to phase trees to whatever in the filesystem space.

Sure, each side will thump its chest from time to time, no big deal. I don't see either side being openly antagonistic in any real deep way. If anything, it's the zealtrous users that are the problem. Fortunately, the developers largely ignore them. :-)

not that I doubt what you claim but I'd love to read on this further. Do you have any links on the topic?

Thnx!

~Christopher

I'm a freebsd developer and 5.0 will be an early adopter release. It won't be stable until 5.2 or so. So in this sense, it's like 2.5.

5.0 has a lot of capabilities towards SMP scalability but too much is not done yet for there to be any performance advantage, even over 4.x. For instance, no drivers are Giant-free yet (GEOM may be close). 5.0 provides the infrastructure to scale but that has to be utilized by all the drivers for it to make a difference. And then there is still testing and tuning to be done. Linux IS ahead but there are plenty of other places BSD is ahead.

In short, don't install 5.0 looking for performance. Instead, install it for the new features and to provide valuable testing input since as the other person said, we are dependent on user testing for bug fixes. Performance will come in time.

Actually, that is not true. Linux 2.4 is already about as good as your going to get on the low end system. Linux 2.6/3.0 focus is on high end machine and it is going to respond extremely well for the high end SMP systems. It might even be comparable to Solaris. But in terms of any performance improvements for most intel systems (1-4 cpus), it will not be noticeable. This is what Andrew Morton, a kernel hacker, had to say about it: "For the uniprocessors and small servers, there will be significant gains in some corner cases. And some losses. [...] Generally, 2.6 should be nicer to use on the desktop. But not appreciably faster." http://www.kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=10

I agree that generally Linux is light years ahead in the GUI department, but the integration I was talking about was on the command prompt. Linux has a tendency of adding more commands/extensions to solve problems that do not exist. On the other hand, FreeBSD uses traditional unix commands and makes you pipe commands (thus giving it a very integrated feeling.) They don't throw everything and the kitchen sink at you. If you play around with RedHat, you would know what I mean (even on the GUI end, RedHat's GUI feels cluttered and unintegrated.) Also, if you use RedHat, you would also definately see the benefits of BSD's ports and packaging system.

As with Debian's packaging system, I have heard very good things about it. I can't comment on it since I haven't tried it, but supposedly it is every bit as good as BSD. Hence, that is probably the reason why you are not impressed with BSD.

The reason why I never bothered myself with Debian is that, until recently, they were really behind in terms of the kernel they use. I don't believe that everyone should jump at the first sight of latest and greatest, but Debian really dragged their feet in this matter (and the 2.4 kernel was really a big improvement over the 2.2 kernel in almost every way). I can't justify myself to use Debian when they seem to consistently drag their feets on new technology even when the new technology is much more stable/secure than the older technology.

to be a decent desktop in my experience. By default it has some very conservative settings, knowing what to change and what to turn on helps tremendously in my experience. However even after my tuning I still experienced mouse-stutters more often under stress then with Linux - although disk i/o was noticably better but networking performance (on a cable modem) was a wash - both do great.

Well I can't really comment on how well FreeBSD 5.0 will scale on an 8 x CPU system since I haven't tried it nor have I seen benchmarks on this. But judging on rumors, which say that FreeBSD 5.0 will be somewhere between Linux 2.4 and 2.6/3.0, I find it difficult to believe that it won't scale to an 8 x CPU system. Linux 2.4 practical scaling limit was 8 CPU's. Hence, I find it difficult to believe that FreeBSD 5.0 will be better than Linux 2.4 in SMP yet not be able to scale as high as 2.4.