On Aug 3, 2007, at 9:25 AM, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
I guess the problem is related to this notion of trying to compete with MS. If people 'buy' brand A because they like features x,y, and z, and brand B has the goal of gaining market share, it will tend to morph intoa clone (feature-wise) of brand A. However, it will tend to take on some of the compromises of brand B that go with features x, y, and z.I stick with debian on my big box because of inertia, the debian policy,the debian security support for all packages in debian/main, and theabsolute ease of applying bug fixes with aptitude. Debian also supportsmy trackball mouse's scroll wheel (IMPS/2) whereas OpenBSD does not. However, my older computers are transitioning away from Debian to BSD because of the newer debian (perhaps all linuxes) being so much slower on them than either older debians or new BSDs.
I don't think it's so much Microsoft's influence as it is a difference in philosophy. Linux distributions put a lot of effort into being convenient desktop OSs. BSD tends to be aimed more at servers, where things like hotplugging aren't as important. If you have to check dmesg for the right device node and then run 'mount' to access a USB flash drive on a server, it doesn't matter much because you aren't going to be doing that often. If you have to do that on your desktop machine every time you plug in your digital camera, it gets old in a hurry. For that matter, ten years ago Linux distributions were already doing fully automated installers while NetBSD and OpenBSD still required you to get out a calculator to figure out the cylinder boundaries for the slices on your hard disk. The two OSs just occupy different points on the easy of use vs. compactness scale.
You see this in hardware support, too. Linux tries to support the newest stuff, because that's what's in desktop machines (and sometimes suffers instability because of it), while BSD tends to take a more conservative approach. Hardware that's seen in desktops but rarely in servers often isn't supported or maintained well in BSD, because it's just not a priority. (The 3c509 ethernet driver, for example, was buggy for *years* in FreeBSD. It never really got fixed, the cards just became obsolete. ;) Another example: The Marvell Yukon gigabit ethernet chipset, common in desktops but rare in servers, is much slower under FreeBSD than under Linux.)
It could be for your particular application, BSD is just the right tool for the job.