Yeah, I wouldn't let one particular forum or mailing list be the judgment to using a BSD distro. I'd be more concerned if the moderator was kicking/banning people for such "errors". That said, I'd second the daemon forums, especially if you don't use FreeBSD and don't want to use a mailing list. jggimi is very knowledgeable over there in the OpenBSD section.

273 wrote, in part:
"I can't understand what's going on with BSD it's far too fragmented!"

My reply:
I don't see BSD being fragmented. There are less than a dozen flavors of BSD that I know of, and they are all based on FreeBSD as far as I can recall. Very stable but, as previously mentioned, driver support lags way behind linux, which is fragmented into literally hundreds of distros.

My opinion: I've used DesktopBSD (dead now), DragonflyBSD, PC-BSD, HamFreeSBIE, & FreeBSD. All good on desktop machines with ethernet, but not so great on netbooks. They WILL work on netbooks, just requires more tweaking. All worked "out-of-box" on desktop machines.

I'm going to try Dragonfly again, and if I'm not happy with it, I'll revert to PC-BSD or FreeBSD again. I should mention that I use legacy GRUB for booting from Puppy Linux, and I'm booting Puppy, debian, slackware, and BSD. Puppy is my main OS, as I have no current need for really great security (it runs as root). The rest is for learning and fiddling, which I've been doing since the early 90's when there weren't that many 'nix variants to choose from.

73 de 'nut

+1 for me
I use Slackware for my desktop
NetBSD for my server

After signing up with FreeBSD forums (NOT FBSD or freebsd or FREEBSD!!!), I read all the rules and thought I was ready to make the perfect posts. And so I did. Then I check back a few hours later, and it is edited because I didn't use manpage attributes every time I cited a userland tool. Damn, not perfect after all.

Then I came here on my path of studying Scientific Linux, and found this thread, and just had to comment after LMAO reading about the "Dutch man" Hahah. But I like it. It's OK if FBSD wants to set a higher standard, and Linux people can do the same or not as they choose. Variety is the spice of life. FBSD is not interested in attracting "newbies" or casual users, they tend to be more interested in attracting the serious hackers, or users that are willing to be more serious with their OS.

I started with Slack in 1994 or so, and quickly moved to BSD's for most of the reasons people cite: the organized and well structured UNIX-like base and uniform source between BSD's, the documentation, and ports, and the ease of compiling a custom kernel. I keep my eyes open on DFBSD, but mostly use FBSD and like I said, would like to learn a little about Scientific Linux, but my downloads keep getting dropped by the servers. Some kind of server timeout is TOO TIGHT, and people that use modems are having trouble the last few years downloading large files.

I also wanted to note that in my experience, it is the immature Linux crowd that keeps me away from Linux. They totally destroyed Slashdot for me, which used to be full of intelligent people and information and comments 15 years ago, until incessant Linux crowd started to destroy all the comment sections with "BSD is dead". I don't really care about what people think of other OS's, so long as there are enough for anyone to make a good choice for themselves and their purposes. I also have less trust in the security of the code in various Linux distributions, and dislike the lack of any base-system standards. But it has its role, as do all the other successful OS's. I also hated the SysV boot process, and associated "runtime levels". With BSDs, I just have 1 /etc/rc file where I place everything I want to start - and that's my entire boot process.

My favorite language is AWK ... Mawk rules I tried all the rest, but I never found any of them to be as effective, elegant, or fast as the combination of Sh + Awk/Mawk + C. Those are my programming standards.

1 members found this post helpful.

Am I alone is HATING the GNU "long options" ? Hehe. Reminds me of the "sentence with spaces" filenames M$ implemented, that UNIX had to drudgingly follow with. Part of the reason people like BSD's is the distain for that sort of thing ... bloat for the sake of incompetance.

It also annoyed me at the beginning, but his editions do not change the style or sense of Your posts, he only makes lives of others less painful (automatic links to man pages, proper language and so). Its harmless and it does a lot of good for the others.

... and lets not forget he does it for free

2 members found this post helpful.

thank you, i will regard it as a good idea
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like shopping when i have a good time

It seems hard to share a data partition between Linux and FreeBSD: FreeBSD can't write to ext3 and Linux can't write to UFS2.

Regarding the ports system: The FreeBSD ports system

FreeBSD can write to ext3 without journal, just mount that ext3 as ext2 on FreeBSD and You are ready to go.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you. Now I don't have an excuse anymore.

But that will mean that fsck will run every time you boot Linux and will complain about the journal being broken. That's what happened for me when using ext2 for Windows at least...

1 members found this post helpful.

Yep.

I am in no way an expert on this, but having used FreeBSD quite a few years back, I became somewhat "intimate" with the system, and even had several thick books on the ins and outs of it. It is probably the most powerful and complicated pain in the ass OS to use(when in console mode). I loved it just for that reason, and I still use it occasionally. However, Linux then and now is still much easier to use in my opinion, and for 95% of users, Linux is the way to go(I'm not talking about M$ or Crapple users here). I also had some time to use NetBSD, and that was a very short time *wink wink*. That IMO, is only for server users.

For the 5% that use BSD everyday, they are typically occult(not meant as an insult). They would defend the OS till their death. BSD is a very strong OS that is hard to use but fun at the same time if you have an incredible amount of patience for it. I am going to give PC-BSD a go soon, so I can't speak for it, but I hear it is much more user friendly than FreeBSD.