[BBLISA] Comparison of BSD vs Linux? (here goes the flame war!)

[Steven M Jones]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I'm in a class at Usenix/Lisa and the instructor is a BSD fan and
> hates Linux. I'd like to get insight from the list of viewpoints,
> security, comparisons, package availability, etc, of the differences
> between the basic worlds of UNIX-like distros.

First lesson I'm sure you already know -- you can't treat "Linux" as a
monolithic offering. There are hundreds of different Linux
distributions. Some very similar, some dissimilar, and others which have
nothing but the kernel family in common.

I'll second what Dave Pascoe wrote: Find the best tool for the job.
Don't forget to include supportability in your evaluation -- will you be
able to keep the platform up to date, get new drivers you're likely to
need, be able to integrate it into your environment, etc etc.


NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD all sprang from the 386BSD work by the
Jolitz' in roughly that order, though Open was a fork from Net as I
recall. 386BSD was 4.4BSD-Lite from UC Berkeley, where Bill Jolitz wrote
enough code for the x86 to produce a bootable package by replacing the
bits that had been removed after the lawsuits with AT&T/Unix Systems
Labs (USL) were over. He also packaged it all up so that it could be
installed on your average 386 PC clone.

That's probably an understatement of what Bill and Lynn did, but
captures the impact -- it was the first freely available open source BSD
you could run on commodity hardware. I can't stress enough what a step
forward this was. Linux had been created at this point but was nowhere
near ready for prime time, while 386BSD was built on more than 10 years
of production and research use of BSD in academia and industry.

NetBSD focuses on portability and very broad platform support. It runs
on the most systems, was first to have IPv6 support, and is frequently
used in academic projects and other research. My recollection is that
NetBSD was the first to split off when Bill was slow to release updates
to 386BSD in 1992.

FreeBSD branched for stability purposes, to provide something you could
reliably operate a business on. It also remained focused on x86 longer,
so it added SMP support before the others. It is widely regarded as the
most stable BSD platform and has fueled startups like Google, Hotmail, etc.

OpenBSD focused on security and is usually considered the most
"hardened" option out of the box, though all can be made secure. It's a
very popular choice for firewall and Internet-facing applications, and
sometimes has an edge in wireless networking support among the BSDs. You
can find much drama about how OpenBSD split off from NetBSD with a
simple Google search.

These variants have diverged over the past ~15 years, but you will often
see drivers ported from one to another, and sometimes whole kernel
subsystems will be adopted and integrated.


I generally prefer FreeBSD (or Solaris) for server roles, for the sake
of stability and manageability. That includes using FreeBSD for
firewalls and web servers. However I'm really disappointed that I can't
have FreeBSD as the host OS for Xen... When I complain about that to
other FreeBSD users, the usual response I get is that jails are meeting
most peoples' needs.

I have been using RedHat/Fedora for years now for desktop and laptop
applications. It's just been easier to do that and usually have
everything ready out of the box with all manner of add-ons (Acrobat,
Flash, etc) without a lot of fuss. Many years ago (2000) I used RedHat
for all production uses in a startup, and it met those needs adequately.


Wow, what a lot of hot air! Hope this was at least amusing or
entertaining for the list.

--Steve.