OT-ish: fedora->crash->single user fsck; FreeBSD->crash->smooth recovery

[Steve Franks]

So, after much tough consideration, I've put Fedora on my laptop.
FreeBSD just won't do a large-ish number of desktop things  (I have 5
FreeBSD systems from 1-10 years old and not a single one will suspend
correctly, even after following the instructions in the handbook.
Just unacceptable for a laptop.  No flash in firefox, I hate flash,
but it's crippling not to have.  Lots of unsupported hardware, etc. [I
know, should have bought a thinkpad, not a bloody compaq]).

Having ran it for about a week, I've got to say, I've really been
taking for granted the stability of FreeBSD.  As people frequently
observe, it just doesn't crash (unless I plug in a weird flash drive,
camera, etc., and I shouldn't be plugging those things into my servers
anyway).  Yea FreeBSD!  Fedora has crashed at least 5 times in one
week.  I guess the demands of running user applications are just too
much (interestingly, it never crashes doing wine, which seems to run
everything these days; most crashes seem related to abusing X (i.e.
changing resolution, dual monitors, etc)).

One other thought on FreeBSD vs. Fedora: dudes, rpm dependencies are
junk (or put differently, our ports maintainers are saints)!  Every
3rd install I have to manually find some .so file.  Worse yet, try
linking libc.a!  What joker took it out of the path!  I've got to
install an rpm to rebuild the kernel!? What about exporting a default
CFLAGS?  FreeBSD was built to compile, not just serve!  Now I
understand why dumb questions on the FreeBSD list occasionally
engender riddicule - linux is dumbbed down almost as bad as windows,
whereas FreeBSD gives me a sense of freedom from stuff I don't need,
and quick builds for that which I do (except acpi ;).

Ok, I'll quit ranting and actually ask a question: The real big thing
that suprised me (about Fedora), is that every damn time it crashes, I
have to sit through 20 minutes of fsck when it boots, then it cries,
gags, and throws me into a root console to run fsck again, manually,
for 20 more minutes.  I'm thinking about symlinking fsck to a rather
dirtier word on the Fedora box.

This has only once ever happened on FreeBSD and I had a gmirror on a
bad disk controller.  What with the crappy usb sticks & such, I've
probably crashed my FreeBSD boxes 10-50 times, and it always boots
right up and does an fsck in the background.  So compare, one manual
fsck in, say, 10 computer-years, vs. 5 in one week.  I'm about ready
to ditch Fedora and spend the time sending logs to freebsd-acpi,
manually configuring amd, etc, etc...

Is ext2/3 really that bad?

Steve