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It's amazing this is the one habit that people apparently mistakingly apply at the wrong places.



Oh, I didn't think that. I think FreeBSD is great so I wanted to make sure lurkers knew I didn't switch it for Linux because anything was wrong with it.



You could adopt my strange behavior and have several watches for several occasions.

Right now I'm wearing one I stole from the merchandise window of a bank, because I was well annoyed with them. So in a way I robbed a bank I guess. If you think about I paid for this watch several times already anyway.

We're planning to go to the jewelry shop this afternoon. I'm bring a few watches that need small repairs or a new battery. Also I'm bringing the Seiko UC-2002 pocket watch:

http://forum.pocketcalculatorshow.com/displayForumTopic/content/292...

I also have 2 keyboards to which it can dock, but the connection doesn't work so I'm hoping at the shop they might know some people who can fix it.

Wow. So, the law enforcement employee in me is in shock right now, but in reality I'm laughing my ass off!

Oh my yes. Sometimes it's little things like the requirement that switches to e.g. ls go *before* and not after the file list. Why? Historical reasons, or something; GNU figures out what you meant, the more traditional versions rely on the order.

At last FreeBSD (and to some extend other BSDs) are willing to include improvements when they are improvements. My favorite example: You can use -print0 with FreeBSD's find, an extension that AFAIK originally came from GNU. Now I understand why a lot of the crazy GNU extensions don't get adopted everywhere, but the fact that the most modern find distributed with Solaris doesn't support -printf or -print0 is just plain ridiculous. Is it any wonder that most Solaris admins' first act is to install the GNU file utils?

A favorite gotcha of mine: Conflicting utilities! FreeBSD supplies a watch(1), but it's not the watch(1) you've come to expect if you've used Linux. Little things like this can be frustrating. Then there are the "I didn't know that wasn't standard" things that are pretty much the same across all Linux distributions but which are actually Linuxisms and not the same elsewhere--things like behavior and usage of ifconfig/netstat, or managing disk partitions.

FreeBSD is, compared to its commercial brothers, a modern and forward-looking *nix that is extremely straightforward and logical. If you're coming from the oddities of traditional UNIX I'm sure it's a breath of fresh air, where Linux would be a much scarier radical departure. That said, coming from the Linux side FreeBSD seems needlessly stodgy and Solaris and other commercial Unixen can be positively asinine.

It's because of xargs.


Solaris has for a long time included GNU equivalents in /usr/sfw. Modern Solaris and Illumos distros often include /usr/gnu/bin in your default PATH.


GNU tools are better in some respects (such as -print0 etc.) and only a fool would not use them. Many modern Solaris-derived distros (such as OpenIndiana) even install them by default (gfind).


watch(8) was first featured in FreeBSD 2.1 from 1995, probably a lot sooner than the Linux watch was developed. If it's anybody's fault, it's probably the fault of the Linux guys for naming their utility by some conflicting name.


Well, disk partitions in particular were intimately tied to the hardware that the systems were developed on. Some people just have different ideas about how things should work - can't blame 'em, a lot of it really comes down to taste (such as ifconfig/netstat).


I'm a heavy Linux and Solaris user and I honestly can't follow your thinking here. Each system has its style and I consider neither inherently superior by design. So yeah, Solaris has some cruft that it has carried to implement such useless things as binary compatibility with older commercial software (who needs a stable ABI, eh Linux?), but on the other hand, some new stuff in Solaris was developed by people who put a lot of thought into it and it came out great: SMF, ZFS, FMA, DTrace, Zones, etc. Linux, at times, feels like a wild experiment of bedroom engineers, an asorted hodge-podge of "my pet project" ideas and really irrational design decision, but at times really great implementations and terrific performance (the networking stack has really matured and I find iptables' structure quite logical).

I have an old Hamilton automatic watch, which my mother gave me about 5 years ago, as she was buying herself a new one. The fact that this little thing has survived my careless daily handling for so long suggests that your fears are unfounded. For a comparison, I have a hard time keeping cellphones in good condition for more than a year.

I did have to replace the glassy windows from time to time though, basically anytime it fell on it from more than 1m above. It costs between €20 and €40, depending on the shop which does it.

Edited 2013-01-25 15:32 UTC

I'm not scared of breaking it. I just wouldn't want to scratch anything that cost a substantial amount.

Think of it like clothes, I wouldn't wear a smart suit to do the gardening. But equally I wouldn't wear a cheap pair of jeans to a wedding.

So what I'm after is a watch that I'm not going to be too precious about rather than something more ornamental to wear for special occasions. I'm just yet to find a watch that's cheap, yet relatively sturdy and which reflects a little of my personality.