2 Bit Hacker

For a long time, I had been a die-hard FreeBSD user, running it on all the servers under my control, my laptop, my home system, everything. Then one day I decided to give Gentoo Linux a try on my laptop. Got to know it, and at this point I find it to work better in that application than FreeBSD did. Since then, I’ve noticed the major difference between Linux and BSD. And it’s not a technical thing, it’s a social thing.

For example, it’s been my experience that when two BSD users meet, and ask each other what they run, it goes something like this: “Hey, I run FreeBSD” “Yeah, so do I” “Cool” “Yeah.” and that’s about it. However, when two Gentoo users meet, you get something like “Hey, I run Gentoo” “Yeah, so do I” “Cool” “What kernel do you run?” “Gaming-sources, how about you?” “Gentoo-sources” “Cool, how’s that working out?” “Pretty good, you run reiserfs?” “No, I’m on XFS” “Ah, interesting, I’d been thinking about that” and so on and so on, covering basically every option that one could select in Gentoo, from the kernel sources down to the syslogger. With BSD, you pretty much know what the system is like just by knowing what it is, with a Linux system, at least with Gentoo, each system is as different as the person running it.

This leads to Linux people, or at least Gentoo people, spending vast amounts of time talking to each other about what little tweaky things they’ve done, or what they want to try, and so on, which inevitably is overheard by other people, who will sometimes think things like “Hey, that sounds neat, I should give it a try.” And so it spreads. BSD people on the other hand, don’t need to talk about it nearly as much, sometimes discussing new features in a new release, but never to the extent that Gentoo people talk. This means less people overhear, and ultimatly less people go around trying to use BSD.

And while this individuality is great for conversation and tinkering and taking up vast amounts of spare time, from a business perspective, it kills. When looking for a Linux system admin, you need to take into consideration what distrobutions he’s familiar with, and what daemons he’s worked with, and what versions, and a bunch of other factors. And when that admin does finally get hired, he’ll need to learn how the last admin did everything. With FreeBSD at least, this happens a lot less, since a lot more of the system is standardized.

So, it’s basically my opinion that Linux and BSD each have their place. I am very much enjoying running Linux on my laptop, and now on my desktop at home, but there is no way I’ll be running it on a server anytime soon. It makes a great discussion piece, but it just doesn’t have the stability and standardization that I desire in a server.