Author: Shannon
Date: 26-09-03 04:08
I am in the process of moving from Linux Mandrake 9.2 to FreeBSD 5.1.
Why?
- Mandrake is slowly but surely doing as I predicted. They are succumbing to their shareholders' desire for the bottom line over everything else. FreeBSD is free. Truely free. Keep your shareholders off my OS!
- Mandrake makes you dependant on Mandrake to upgrade packages if you're not willing to go through dependancy hell. To upgrade gAIM wasn't the two days of frustration and system screwing on FreeBSD that it was on Mandrake. It was "make install clean" and then an occasional "portupgrade gaim".
- There's only one FreeBSD. There's endless Linux distros, all doing things a different way.
-FreeBSD gives me more stability than Mandrake did, even when using the "unstable" 5.1 and all the latest software in the ports tree. It's the best of both worlds - stability and currency.
- My favorite game (Neverwinter Nights) runs better under FreeBSD than it does under Linux in 9 out of 10 aspects. (Somehow, the image of what your character was doing while the save was being made doesn't show under FreeBSD, and the NVidia driver is a bit temperamental with NWN... but those are certainly not FreeBSD's fault.)
- Amusing as it may sound... using 'edit' at the command line. It's much more familiar and intuitive than vi.
- Ports rock, naturally.
- Two words: Make world.
- Sane kernel configuration and compilation.
- burncd lets me create CDs without mucking around in SCSI simulation.
- portupgrade is incredible. Being able to upgrade every installed package in a single command is priceless.
- The complete FreeBSD handbook online, and installed with the OS!
- FreeBSD-questions mailing list.
In a world that is going madder and madder, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD are rays of hope. FreeBSD's ways of doing things make sense to me.
My success story, I suppose, is that I am running FreeBSD 5.1-p5. That I have overcome 85% of the hurdles to making it my only OS. And that I feel like I can achieve the other 15% also.
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