March 18

Linux vs BSD

I found an article/rant that attempts to explain some of the differences between BSD & Linux.

I have run BSD very briefly on my laptop once but decided that I wasn't quite ready to learn a whole new operating system just then and ended up nuking it. I am not sure I agree with all of the things he says, and it is difficult to compare one derivative of UNIX with all the flavours of Linux but still its not a bad read.

He makes an argument that the BSD ports tree is highly centralized
"But all those files in that big directory tree are maintained by the FreeBSD project itself. When somebody wrote KDE, for instance, it didn't magically appear in ports trees everywhere. Somebody had to write all the necessary `glue' to build a port for it, then commit the files into the FreeBSD CVS repository so it would be in the ports collection. So again, there's some level of assurance that it works with other things in the ports collection. Any dependencies it has will be there, because it can't declare a dependency on something not in ports."


I must be missing something because I see the Debian package archive in much the same light.

Posted by æc♥ | Permanent Link