FreeBSD vs Linux

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Apr 20, 2005, at 3:55 PM, mmiranda at americatel.com.sv wrote:

>
>> koen de wijs wrote:
>>> Hello folks,
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm new to unix. This year I tried FreeBSD. Some friend of
>> mine adviced
>>> FreeBSD. I think it works great. Only one thing that I
>> don't like is
>>> that you will need to know a lot to setup a lot of basic stuff.
>
> Yeah, this is unix my friend, that mean you have to get dirty "AND 
> LEARN"  a
> lot in the process.
>
>> There are a million sites discussing this, it's a flamebait,
>> and no one
>> wants to have that start up, so what you are doing is being (possible
>> innocently, but I wonder) very very impolite.
>
> I totally agree, stop whining and begin to read, read, read a lot,
> Do you want the easy way? go with linux,
> btw, i think windows xp is the rigth choice to you ;-) , you dont want 
> to
> read and learn, dont even touch a unix terminal

I'm afraid after playing with both FreeBSD and some different distros 
of Linux, that "easy way" isn't necessarily Linux either.  If anything 
it can get to be much more complex if used on the desktop when it comes 
to installing and updating software unless you only stick to that 
distro's "way" of installing new software.  And if you set it up to do 
more complex tasks it still takes every bit as much understanding and 
altering of files as FreeBSD does! :-)

The only "easy way" to go with installing things on a computer would 
have to be Windows (in the Intel world), since it is most often just a 
matter of clickclickclickclick done.  Windows will usually run for 
several weeks while gathering glut and goo in the registry, in 
temporary directories, screwing up various things in the background.  
It has to be easy to set up because you end up having to reinstall when 
it "starts acting weird" :-)

Really though; with Windows, it's a matter of "I want a web 
server...down load "web server"...click click license yeah yeah 
click... oooh! Web server! (don't know what it has open in the 
background or what scripts are enabled or disabled or...but who 
cares...web server!)

With a Unix system it's "I want a web server...<google>....hmm...Apache 
looks like it should work...<search through ports>....make 
install....edit config file...what's this 
do?...oh...<google>....<google>...neat!...edit config...what's this 
directive?...<google>....okay...edit...save...apachectl start...web 
server with X, Y, Z enabled, ,listening on port X, logging to Y, with 
virtual host Z.  WEB SERVER!"