Negative Review of FreeBSD 5.4

Johnson David davidjohnson at siemens.com
Thu Jun 2 10:21:24 PDT 2005


From: Neal E. Westfall [mailto:nwestfal at dslextreme.com]
>
> Anybody have any thoughts on this review?
> 
> http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/24/2153257&tid=8

I have some contrary thoughts. The first thought is "geez, here's another
review from a Linux site slamming a non-Linux operating system". The very
first thing he says is that FreebSD 5.x still isn't ready for primetime. I
see this over and over again in every FreeBSD review from a Linux user. Am I
the only one who has never had any problems with the 5.x branch? Many of his
problems were more his own fault. Like his bitching that the mini ISO didn't
have his Realtek driver but the full ISO did. Then use the full ISO! Duh!

My other thought is the opposite. We really do have a problem in that we are
unable to support every possible weird ass piece of hardware out there. But
it's a problem we cannot fix. We just don't have the manpower or resources
to do it. I do sympathize with the reviewer in that his very expensive
bleeding edge workstation won't run FreeBSD in the precise configuration he
wants. I know what he feels, because I have similar issues with Linux. For
two years I tried to get Linux installed on my home system with SATA drives.
The reason I couldn't was that no distro built in SATA support to their
install CDs or floppies.

But in the end I keep coming back to a third thought: I would really really
like to see, once in my life, a review of FreeBSD that reflects my own
experiences with it. I would like to see a review that's something more than
a laundry list of bugs.

David


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