BSD vs. Linux | Hacker News Reader

BSD vs. Linux

aboutthebsds.wordpress.com

7 pointskunai19 comments

The article is about as worthwhile as the comments:

God doesn’t want BSDs because BSDs don’t respect the freedom of Humans. BSD developers will burn in hell because the the license doesn’t follow the 10 commandments like GPL does. Richard Stallman is a messiah sent to us by God himself, let him show us the path to righteousness, let him drive us to heaven! Let us be purged of this evil my brothers!

FreeBSD even uses a demon as their mascot, what blasphemy is this!? The BSDs have strayed too far from the path of righteousness but thank God for sending us the prophet Linus Torvalds for he and Richard Stallman are our only salvation. As long as these 2 brave souls are by our side there will be hope.

Do not worry my brethren, God will punish all who make and use BSD and BSD will be wiped out of the face of the earth.

God bless GNU/Linux.

That one at least sounds like it's ridiculing the readership of the blog.

The whole blog is sort of Poe's law territory. I suspect the author is a nutjob rather than a troll, but a lot of the comments I have no idea if they're agreeing with him or making fun of him.

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

I know this guideline is meant for comments, but I would consider it equal for submitted articles. The only thing a discussion around this article can create is a classic flamewar over bsd vs linux, or bsd vs gpl. Neither would bring genuinely new and interesting comments, but simply a "I will uppvote anyone posting positive things about my sport team, and I will downvote anyone who posts positives things about the opposing team".

That's not why I submitted it though. The point of this article was to show that misleading things about BSD are all over the internet. I apologize if that didn't somehow manifest itself. The original title was actually "The truth about BSD (apparently)," but of course, it got changed under the classic HN scapegoat of "editorialization."

The article begins by complaining that all over the Internet people write misleading things about their sport team, and thus goes and write why their team is great and the opposing team is wrong.

You then submit it here to "show" that misleading things about your sport team (the opposing team to the article) are all over the Internet.

Exactly how do you expect this will bring genuinely new and interesting comments about either team?

"It also protects user and developers from ... any malicious persons or companies who try to sue them over the software."

How could a software license (a contract between the user and the providers of the software) possibly protect a Linux user from being sued by a third party? The third party didn't agree to the contract, so it's not bound by it in any way.

The "BSDs" are vastly different systems with different designs, goals, and cultures. Making blanket statements, without any specific examples is worrthless. This is trash meant to appeal to the biases of readers too poorly informed to know their ignorance.

There's some guy (with multiple aliases) who trolls the Phoronix forums whenever there's a BSD-related topic. I'm pretty sure this is his blog.

> Lol, BSD is for losers, switched from FreeBSD to Ubuntu 10 years ago and never looked back..

This comment made my day

Article sounds biased. I'd like to read a riposte from a BSD follower.

Very good article, thank you. I'm so glad I'm using Arch Linux (GNU/Linux)

It seems you misunderstood the point of this submission.

BSD is absolutely not what it says in this article, hence the editorialized "apparently" in this article. (Hope the HN mods don't ban me for it :P)

Don't take everything on HN at face value. Sometimes things are meant to be analyzed, like that "What 4chan thinks of HN" post.

Actually, what is said in the article is truth. Because I tried OpenBSD and FreeBSD before and many of the points are valid. ^_^ I just haven't had time to test them all.

Care to comment on which of those points you found valid?

Sure :-) #1 "Installing Software" I absolutely agree linux is much better with this. I had issues installing even the simplest of applications that just work on linux. #2 "Security" using "PF" was horrible in comparison to iptables when I tried it. But all this VS posts is useless in the end. Use what works for you personally and don't listen to anyone else.

Installing software depends on the quality of your package manager.

Otherwise you do it the same way, typically with the GNU build system.

The ports tree is the most natural form of package management I've used. Then, if you prefer binaries, you have pkgng and the pkg_install utility. This is for FreeBSD, at least.

I can't believe that you had any issues installing packages on OpenBSD. I've had a much harder time installing software on some Linux systems. From my personal experience in OpenBSD, if there is a package for the software it more or less works, if there is not you better move on. Porting software to OpenBSD is not an easy task if you don't know what your doing (I don't).

Even though I like BSD systems I must admit I think Linux is a better choice on the Desktop, I would't know about servers. The most annoying thing that happens to me constantly in Linux and even as I type this is that from one release to the other hardware that used to work stops working. But this is not a show stopper as most issues can be easily worked around. Since virtualization became a viable choice to most consumers I don't see an excuse not to use Linux.

Yeah well try comparing BSD package manager and pacman :-) You'll see what I mean. Especially AUR ^_^

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