But ooooh what a primitive install, that Gentoo.  Reminds me of early 
Slackware (2.x?) or so with 1.0.9 kernel.

*shudders*

Regardless, Gentoo intrigues me - seems to be headed in the same 
general direction as the BSD's.

FreeBSD is a good balance of simple and powerful.  The installer is 
very RedHat 5.2-ish, but more complete.
RH 5.2 - now THAT was a good, solid, stable Linux distro....  RH 6.2 
was good also.  Downhill ever since then, IMHO.
I switched to FreeBSD after the trainwreck that was the Redhat 7.x 
days.  Maintaining two versions of gcc, one for kernel,
the other for general use... *sigh*

Anyway, on a more constructive note - if you can build it out of the 
ports tree on FreeBSD, you will, in general, have no
problems.  All your favorite open-source apps live in the ports tree, 
and all work much the same as they do on Linux.
There is Linux binary compatibility available, but I've had no use for 
it.  As a server OS, using the open source standbys,
FreeBSD will not disappoint.

Desktop?  My knowledge is limited, but I know of a few who swear by it. 
   I'm a OSX guy on the desktop.  Fiddling with
XF86Config to get that new video card to work with my favorite 
modeline,  or the mouse scroll wheel working no longer
appeals to me.

Notebooks? don't bother.  Proprietary binary drivers for strange 
hardware are few and far between in the BSD world.
Yes, there are drivers available for xxxx card and yyyy adapter, but as 
compared to Linux, ready-to-use binaries from
3rd parties are a non-trivial endeavor.

FreeBSD likes vanilla hardware.  Conversely, there are a surprising 
amount of high-zoot parts supported that typically
would be considered server-only hardware, owing to the seemingly 
server-centric nature of FreeBSD.  Getting the brand-x
soundcard you bought off of Ebay to work - don't get your hopes up.

HTH,
-D

On 25 Jun 2005, at 11:55, Alvaro Zuniga wrote:

> /usr/portage
>
> Dixon Cole wrote:
>> From a FreeBSD standpoint:
>>
>> /usr/ports
>>
>> 'nuff said.
>>
>> -D
>>
>> Joseph Fruchey wrote:
>>
>>> Without a flame war, I'd like some of your opinions on the BSD's, why
>>> are they better/not better than Linux, compatibility issues, etc.
>>>
>>> Thanks. :- )
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> General mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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