Linked by Bob Minvielle on Wed 17th Jul 2002 19:18 UTC
There have been many articles as of late about the so called "source" distributions of Linux. Articles about "rpm hell" and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.
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"That said, I'd like to point out that Gentoo is a desktop distribution an on the desktop, Linux kicks FreeBSD's ass."
Let's see, they both serve as a platform for... X, which is... inherently slow due to the use of sockets for IPC.
You'd be amazed how incredibly slow sockets are. Try benchmarking them sometime.
"First, the preemptible kernel makes for a much more responsive system."
So are you patching a mainline kernel or using a 2.5 kernel? In either case I have this to say, the FreeBSD task scheduler is much more responsive. FreeBSD has true LWPs and HWPs, as opposed to Linux's quasi-LWPs created with clone(). Multithreaded applications will simply operate better under FreeBSD, and this includes most of the GUI apps that a "desktop user" would consider running.
"Second, it has much better sound support via ALSA."
Well, can't really argue there... I can only say that NICs which work fine in FreeBSD (such as various incarnations of the 3c905C and Intel EtherExpress pro) tend to horribly fail in Linux. Both operating systems have spotty hardware support.
"Third, it has XFS."
I love XFS and use it for all my fileservers!
"While FreeBSD's softupdates-enabled UFS is nice"
Very nice for small volumes. Since you don't really have to worry about fsck times on small volumes used in desktops, you can do things like cache metadata operations! It's really quite nice.
"XFS is ultimately faster"
Try doing something like rm -r on a large directory in XFS and UFS and see which one takes longer.
"and has a bunch of useful tools and features (node monitoring, recovery/backup tools, file attributes, ACLs) that FreeBSD doesn't."
To a desktop user? I would think that the desktop user wouldn't want all the bells and whistles, and would rather have performance.
XFS is really nice, but unfortunately since it is b-tree based filesystem operations aren't always linear time as it has to traverse the tree and perform rather complicated insertion and removal operations.
XFS also had a rather nasty issue where it would journal a metadata operation without flushing the buffer cache. If a crash occured during this time, you'd find the file whose metadata had been journaled but not flushed to disk filled with zeroes. I've been told this has been corrected, but nevertheless it's a very nagging issue.
When it comes down to it, Linux is just very new code in comparison. The BSDs have the advantage of being tuned over a period of decades, and have proven themselves to have rock solid stability and superior performance.
Contrast this with Linux, where the entire VMM was replaced in the stable kernel line. Something's not right there.