Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2011 15:32:38 -0700 From: Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: xdm-options - non-bsd user needs bsd rc.d advice Message-ID: <20110303223238.GA47498@guilt.hydra> In-Reply-To: <4D700FA6.1030806@cox.net> References: <4D700FA6.1030806@cox.net>
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--LQksG6bCIzRHxTLp Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 05:01:10PM -0500, John D. Hendrickson and Sara Darn= ell wrote: >=20 > Hi. I'm a BSD idiot I use [Debian] linux. [snip] >=20 > If anyone would like to quickly comment I'd love to hear why bsd would=20 > be a better choice than ubantu (for what audience it is better). FreeBSD is definitely a better choice for *me* than Debian, or (worse yet) Ubuntu. I'm temporarily stuck in a hell of my own making, of sorts, because I installed Debian on a laptop I bought to make up for the fact that I managed to buy a laptop for which FreeBSD does not yet have complete graphics support (Intel HD video). The end result is significant annoyance. Debian, since I used it regularly about half a decade ago, has become increasingly complicated by attempts to guess what users want and provide it. This approach tends to result in making it very difficult to do things differently if you want to. Problems I'm encountering right now mostly center around networking issues -- for some asinine reason, it will connect to my WPA encrypted wireless network at home, but not to an open wireless network at a coffee shop. It makes no reasonable sense. With FreeBSD, it would be a trivial exercise to make it work. Worst-case scenario, I could just change a couple of lines in /etc/rc.d and enter the /etc/rc.d/netif restart command. On Debian, I've tried about half a dozen different approaches to getting it to connect to the coffee shop network, including more than one GUI with a seriously suboptimal interface, with no luck; it just keeps failing to get an IP address. I'm pretty sure there's some kind of automagical DWIMmery going on behind the scenes, trying to guess what I want it to do and doing it without my permission, and getting its guesses *wrong*. The upshot is this: FreeBSD is better for people who like essentially deterministic behavior out of their OSes, where the same input produces the same output, with (little or) no chance of it blowing up in your face or just stubbornly refusing to let you do what you want to do because some developer somewhere set up automagical default management based on what *he* thinks you *really* want to do. Debian to some extent, and Ubuntu to a far greater extent, is for people who don't want to know anything about what the system is doing under the hood, to the extent that if the system doesn't get it right automatically the person will refuse to actually spend any time learning enough about the system to fix the problem. Things are getting positively Microsoftish. In case you couldn't tell, I'm frustrated. I'm beginning to wonder whether having 4:3 resolution stretched out to a 16:9 aspect ratio display might be a lesser evil than using Debian, when it is even more annoying now (relative to FreeBSD) than it was five years ago. tl;dr summary: FreeBSD is "power-user" friendly. Linux-based systems are getting increasingly "dumbed-down user" obsequious, to the detriment of people who like being able to customize the system's behavior (or, y'know, actually troubleshoot it at all). --=20 Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] --LQksG6bCIzRHxTLp Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (FreeBSD) iEUEARECAAYFAk1wFwYACgkQ9mn/Pj01uKXsAwCWNX3iYki5asWQl9JNrGvTLz2l ZgCg7cSqkFPnY5SZFO6dXB+kagR/Q0Q= =F/ao -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --LQksG6bCIzRHxTLp--
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