Which OS for notebook

[Chad Perrin]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 10:50:42AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Mark Blackman <mark at exonetric.com> wrote:
> > There's also the whole train of thought that says FreeBSD isn't really
> > aimed at the desktop/laptop/notebook use model and any benefit in that arena
> > is entirely coincidental.
> 
> That tends to be my perspective.  Linux tends to be more useful on
> laptops and desktops, where up-to-the-minute hardware support is
> needed.  For servers, where stability is important, I tend to prefer
> BSD, all other things being equal.

Weird.  I guess maybe my excellent experience of using FreeBSD on my
ThinkPad is "wrong", and so is my experience of various Linux
distributions having more maintenance issues than FreeBSD on similar
hardware, and I should stop.


> 
> Besides the mindshare issue that's been mentioned, part of the problem
> here is the balkanized nature of open source licenses, too.  Linux
> driver code is useless to FreeBSD developers because the GPL isn't
> compatible with the BSD license.

I don't think that's the case.  Maybe such drivers cannot be integrated
directly with the base system without licensing issues, but it can
certainly be distributed and installed when appropriate.  It is, in fact,
for this reason of compatibility that FreeBSD has had ZFS support where
Linux-based systems have not.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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