FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows XP

[Anthony Philipp]

> I have put an easier version of the comparison up at:
> 
> http://www.home.no/hedhnta/versus.txt
> 
> So please post corrections referring to each paragraph.
> It would also be nice to include Mac OS X in this comparison.


1.3	All Windows users are familiar with the "Blue Screen of Death". Poor 
	reliability is one of the major drawbacks of Windows. Some of the major 
	issues have been fixed in Windows 2000, but "code bloat" has introduced 
	many more reliability problems. Windows 2000 uses a lot of system resources 
	and it is very difficult to keep the system up for more than a couple of 
	months without it reverting to a crawl as memory gets corrupted and 
	filesystems fragmented.

This is from the website mentioned above. If you're going to compare
FreeBSD to Linux to Windows XP at least make sure you're comparing
Windows XP and not Windows 2000. Also I don't think we should copy
MS and refer to "Linux" and mean a specific distrobution. I suggest
you pick a specific distrobution and compare that to the other OSes.
My personal suggestion would be Debian, since this seems to be the
OS which would give FreeBSD the best run for it's money. I also
think it would be a good idea to include OSX in the comparison,
however you might want to compile to different lists. One would be
for people comparing the OSes from a server perspective, and one
would be from a desktop perspective. 

4.2	The Linux ext2 filesystem gets its performance from having an asynchronous 
	mount. You can mount FreeBSD UFS filesystems as asynchronous but this is 
	very dangerous and no seasoned Unix admin would do this. It's amazing that 
	Linux is designed this way by default. Often a hard carsh permanently 
	damages a mount. FreeBSD or Solaris can sustain a very hard crash with only 
	minor data loss, and the filesystem will be remountable with few problems.

I don't think it is really fair for us to compare ext2 and UFS2 and
FAT. Perhaps we should be comparing NTFS vs reiserfs or JFS vs UFS2.
I know we don't have to stage the comparison to make FreeBSD stand
out. It can stand on its own performance. 

9.2	Linux is a Unix-like kernel that must be combined with the GNU system to 
	make a complete operating system. Linux does not use any version control 
	system so all bug-fixes and enhancements must be emailed back and forth on 
	mailing lists and ultimately submitted to the one person (Linus) who has 
	authority to commit the code to the tree. Due to the overwhelming amount of 
	code that gets written, it is impossible for one person to adequately 
	quality control all of the pending changes. For this reason there is a lot 
	of code in Linux that was hastily written and would never have been 
	accepted into a more conservative operating system.

I don't think this is true any longer. 

9.3	Microsoft Windows is a closed-source operating system driven by market 
	demand rather than technical merit. New technologies are rushed into the 
	product before they have been properly designed or fully implemented. Very 
	little is known about the internal development infrastructure of Microsoft 
	but the "blue-screen of death" speaks for itself.

When was the last time you had a blue screen of death? For me it was
over a year ago when I was having a hardware issue. Just based off
of my anecdotal evidence FreeBSD has crashed less than either my
Gentoo system or my windows system, but I don't think it is fair to
say that Windows blue screens on a fairly regular basis. 

Also I think you should add an ease of use section. This is why most
people use Windows or OSX over some *nix system. That and it is what
other people they know are using. This means they can get help from
their friends. This is not something which should be discounted. 

> Thank you all!
> Now let's get down to work!
> 

I think it is a good idea, just needs a few revisions, keep up the
good work!

Anthony Philipp