Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:56:56 -0700 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: N6REJ <n6rej@tcsn.net> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RedHat vs FreeBSD Message-ID: <3AED9958.EA60088B@acuson.com> References: <00c201c0d139$dcef8680$c098ca3f@disappointment>
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N6REJ wrote: > > Hello, I've been using RedHat for about 2yrs now, and like it pretty well, > but I'm told that FreeBSD is much more secure right out of the box, and that > over all its a better OS. Can anyone explain the caveats that I might be > getting into? Pro/Con's...etc.... > Thanks in advance. And Please, don't flower it or distort it. I'm still > new at this so what you say to me will matter. It depends upon what you will be using your system for. If it's a web server, then FreeBSD wins hands down. Even diehard Windows users use FreeBSD for their web servers. If you're using it on a client box, be aware there you will encounter numerous "linuxisms". I haven't encountered anything serious, but there will be a few annoyances playing that latest and greatest Linux game out of the box. Overall, Linux is designed as a "hodge-podge" of parts. FreeBSD is an integrated whole. For a lot of people, this won't make any difference, but for me it makes it feel more solid. You'll have to do most of your FreeBSD administration by hand, editing text configuration files. To me this is no big deal, as I find Redhat's linuxconf utility to be confusing. The advantage with having to edit configs by hand is that your knowledge will be applicable to any Unix system. But when you know linuxconf inside and out, that's all you know and it won't do you any good on Debian, SuSE, Slackware, etc. And finally, the FreeBSD documentation is far superior. Period. The heart of Unix documentation is the man pages. I don't care what RMS says about man pages, info pages are hard to navigate, frequently incomplete, and non-standard. Linux does not have good man pages. On the other hand, Linux has made up for the lack of fundamental documentation by creating some fairly good HOW-TOS. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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