[Hrgeeks] Text Editors

[S. Bergeron]

On Mar 31, 2010, at 1:22 PM, Adam Crosby wrote:

>>
>> - I *Do* think that apt-get is far and away as good as the fbsd  
>> ports system .. but 'rpm' .. really?
>
> apt-get is 'as good as' ports?  Having to maintain a huge chunk of  
> filesystem and suck up all those inodes for a list of packages I  
> could possibly one day want to install, with no straight forward way  
> to search, and then, once I want one, I have to download the source  
> and COMPILE it?  Is it 1995 still?

That's OpenBSD.  Let's do the time warp again!

But ports would have to improve to suck.  In so many ways pkgsrc is a  
better system.  There's a reason why DragonFly ditched ports for pkgsrc.

>>
>> - if I want a man page on a program .. I just type man {program}  
>> and get an answer .. I dont' first type man {program} .. oops ..  
>> nope .. ok info {program} .. oh damn .. a tree .. lemme scroll  
>> down .. nope still not there .. AAUUUGGHGHHHH
>
> Uh, at least the last time I used FreeBSD, if you wanted to see the  
> man page for a GNU util, it STILL told you to check info.  That's  
> GNU being retarded, not a linux thing.

Except for the Debian-based things.  Part of the development guidelines.

>>
>> - if I want to rebuild my OS .. I can just cd /usr/src, make  
>> buildworld .. and look .. I have my entire OS updated ..
>
> What if you only want to update a part of it, because updating  
> everything breaks software you need to run (*cough* vmware  
> *cough*).  You also forgot the critical step of downloading and  
> checking out the entire source tree for the operating system,  
> including huge chunks of crap you'll never actually use.

Again, FreeBSD fails there, too.  NetBSD is better, but only  
marginally so.

>> - I mean if FreeBSD sucked so bad as a desktop .. it wouldnt' be  
>> used as the basis for a major desktop OS would it? or a  major  
>> phone OS would it?  That'd be completely unrealistic ;-)
>
> It's not used as the basis, chunks of it were stolen for it.  Same  
> as Windows used to use TCP/IP.  If freebsd were so awesome as a  
> desktop, we'd be using it as such.

OS X pre-dates FreeBSD, and most of the first three releases didn't  
use much FreeBSD code until the fourth release (10.3).  Hiring Jordan  
Hubbard will do that.  But, still, OS X's kernel is still *Mach*.  It  
doesn't use FreeBSD hardware drivers at all.  TCP/IP stack, Unix  
compatibility, and we're done.  The interesting APIs in OS X don't use  
much native FreeBSD functionality at all.

> As much as a used to like FreeBSD, most of this is now crap.   
> OpenBSD is doing amazing things with networking stuff, ZFS  
> availability is nice (as Ethan mentioned), but I've got no idea what  
> benefits FreeBSD brings to the table these days.  Linux even has  
> Zero Copy and interrupt mitigation features that used to give  
> FreeBSD a big technical edge on performance.  What's left besides  
> history or personal preference?

Feeling of superiority, that pic of Beastie reaming Tux, that chick  
dressed as Beastie, sly asides about it being the base of OS X to try  
and pick up chicks.

And FreeBSD doesn't even have much, if any, performance edge anymore.   
It's a cobbled-together bundle of fail these days.  Gentoo with a  
different kernel.

--sb