FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows 2000 comparison

[David Kramer]

On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:

> David Kramer wrote:
> > I stumbled on this page today.
> > http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/bsd_flier.html
> > 
> > Do you feel that this comparison is still accurate?
> 
> We must understand that the comparison was written by a FreeBSD 
> partisan. Naturally, there is a certain amount of bias in his assumptions.

Clearly.

> One of the downticks that Linux receives are because of its default use 
> of a non-journalled write-behind file system. It is indeed true that 
> this may not be the best possible choice for a mission critical server. 
> On the other hand, it probably contributes to the excellent performance 
> of Linux on modest legacy hardware; desktop users, especially those 
> using older computers, may be willing to trade off a bit of data 
> security for better performance. Recent distributions make it easy to 
> choose a different file system; ext3 on Red Hat, reiserfs on SuSE. jfs 
> is now in the source tree for 2.5; we'll see future distributions that 
> make it easy to use it.

UFS happens to be very good, but yes, Linux has journalling file systems 
too.  And they are right to not have them as the default; even for 
business use they're not always the right choice.

As was discussed at a recent meeting, all a journalling file system buys 
you is not having to fsck the disks when the system comes back.  You are 
not guaranteed zero data loss or anything you would imaging if you think 
it works like SQL DBMS transactions.

> The author also objects to the very open development process used for 
> Linux, preferring instead the less widely spread development model of 
> FreeBSD. There are indeed strengths to the FreeBSD model, but there are 
> also advantages of the Linux model that the author does not address.

They're a little more cathedral, we're a little more bazaar.  As ESR says, 
there are advantages to both.  Neither is clearly better.

> He also doesn't talk about ease of installation and administration. 
> Modern distributions of Linux come with good GUI tools for those tasks. 
> On FreeBSD, you're still looking at working in character mode. Working 
> in text has its advantages, but I'd still give some advantage to Linux 
> for giving you a choice.

Admin is easier with some of these tools, if you're into that sort of 
thing (I like man pages and emacs, thanks).  You have to give BSD props 
for the Ports collection though.  Makes hunting for RPM's look primitive.

> Finally, I'd give Windows a neutral rating at best on device drivers. 

Here here.  Everyone cites this as a big advantage of Windows, but there 
are such big holes in the coverage, and some are very low quality.  But 
how would you know, without the source code  ;)

> The problem with Windows driver support is that Microsoft doesn't exert 
> any pressure on developers to provide support for older devices on new 
> versions of Windows. It's not uncommon to have to retire 
> still-functional hardware when you upgrade. Linux, by contrast, has an 
> excellent record of maintaining support for legacy hardware, though I'm 
> disheartened by the decision of the XFree86 team to ignore a lot of 
> older video hardware in their 4.x releases.

Like NT not supporting USB.

> 
> And to correct his statements about the Windows file systems, NTFS was 
> indeed designed for multi-user systems. It's actually a reasonable 
> design, comparable in technical merit to the non-journalling Unix file 

True.  I saw some of the specs for NTFS once and there was some pretty 
cool stuff in there.  Like a lot of "superblock-type stuff" is located 
physically in the middle of the partition to reduce the maximum seek time 
to that metadata.

> FreeBSD is indeed a "tighter" system than Linux, probably because it is 
> developed by a small team. Everything is neatly packaged and works well 
> together. I'd consider it strongly for server use. The greater diversity 
> of Linux, on the other hand, certainly makes it a lot more fun for the 
> desktop hacker; there's a lot more stuff to play with, and there's a 
> better chance that a driver exists for that stray piece of hardware you 
> have lying around or pick up at the MIT Flea.

And in the end that's why I'll probably end up using Linux and FreeBSD for 
my replacement server I'll be building in the next few weeks.  If it were 
a straight server, I might think about FreeBSD though.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD  "The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most
DKK D  experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; 
DK KD  we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." 
DDDD                                          -Nathaniel Borenstein