Originally posted by: yoda291
One uses a blowfish for a mascot, the other uses a little devil
It's called a pufferfish
And my mom thinks FreeBSD is evil...of course, she wouldn't let me get a 3dfx "Voodoo" video card back in the days when those were the best, because of the image on the box. :frown:
Netbsd, if you're interested, is pretty much all about running unix on just about as many environments as possible. Very good for embedded devices.
NetBSD, in addition to being very portable, also seems very "clean," at least from my limited experience with it.
A few weeks ago, I installed NetBSD on an 800MHz AMD Duron server with a 4.3GB hard disk and 640MB of RAM. The install was very smooth (better than Debian's, but mainly because NetBSD's install lacked the kernel module selection thing; the disk partitioning part threw me off a bit, and caused an unnecessary reinstall which would have been rendered needless if I had read the instruction manual before starting), and the pkgsrc system worked well. It was different from Debian's apt-get, but not in a bad way (I still prefer apt-get, however, simply due to familiarity). However, the Linux compatibility was the sticking point for me, and since it refused to run the Linux version of the Folding@Home distributed computing client, I ended up reinstalling Debian Linux.
In conclusion, I liked the simple but elegant nature of NetBSD, and would have kept using it if it weren't for the F@H client issues. Nevertheless, it will most likely be the OS of choice if/when I get the used laptop that I'm hoping to get.
Originally posted by: arcain
FreeBSD has the ports directory tree (really easy, well laid out way of installing things), and err.. at one point had a far superior VM subsystem compared to Linux (I don't know if this is still the case), and I think maybe superior thread support.
I realize that there are many subtle differences among the BSDs, but I didn't notice much of a performance difference between NetBSD 1.6 and Debian Linux with the 2.4.20 kernel. However, that's not saying much, because I never stressed either of them or put them through proper tests
I used to FreeBSD, but I switched to Linux, because I felt Linux had better NAT support, and just better support in general. Since more people use it, it has better commercial support (Java VM, drivers, etc..) and better (more anyways) documentation.
Better NAT? From what I've read, OpenBSD takes the prize in the NAT area. Better commercial support of Linux? Definitely (and that's one reason why I use Linux - it's easier to find Java VMs, drivers for some "win" modems, etc.). More documentation? Yea, but it's not necessarily better. It takes me a while to search though bunches of crap to find what I need when I'm looking for documentation for Linux, but finding what I needed to know when running NetBSD was always quick, and when I found the information, it was usually helpful.
Also FreeBSD has poor SMP support.. or it did at the time. I believe they've been working on that, but I don't know where they are. Wasn't/Isn't a factor for me right now, but perhaps it matters to you.
Can't comment there, no experience.
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