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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

> It's been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD.

Ok fair enough, but the same can be said about manual v automatic transmissions, static versus interpreted languages, etc.

When something is harder to use then you're forced to think about it more and understand it better.

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I also think, it's somewhat of a fallacy. Most BSD users have come into touch with Linux at some point, whereas the reverse happens not nearly as often (in relative terms), and that's mainly because Linux is simply more popular.

A consistently designed well-documented system is probably easier to use, all else being equal.

In day to day use I agree, although it is harder to get exotic software to work on the BSDs.

That's a consequence of that software being written with only Linux in mind, not a problem with the BSDs as such. Also, somebody needs to write a port, and the only person who'll do that is somebody with skin in the game.

Obviously I'm an outlier, but if I need some software on FreeBSD, I'll contribute a port. Most of the time, it's almost trivial, and it's only with very obscure (maude is one that I'm currently working on) or newish (RethinkDB, which isn't written in a super portable manner - it doesn't even use pkg-config and has a hand-written configure script!) where there's an issue.

Yes, in fact Torvald and community (in the other OS hand) understood it, but particularly I fun to play with Linux and BSD both options are strongly valid.

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