On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, Florin Iucha wrote: > On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 07:21:06AM -0600, steve ulrich wrote: > >> not necessarily from the perspective of making things >> work, although in my experience it certainly does, but because the end >> users get a consistent system with a _known_ suite of elements. > > Again the word 'consistent'. And about _known_ - that's no big deal: > you have the source code, you can _know_ what you are running, should > you care to look at it. Do you review the source code deltas before > upgrading your machines? For me, GNU is known. It's been ported to other OSs for more than a decade and I use GNU software all the time on Solaris and Linux systems. So if I switched to FreeBSD, I'd be entering the unknown because most BSD systems are not running the GNU software. >> on a *BSD system i know that i'm going to have a certain well defined >> set of libraries, utilities and a well honed upgrade path. it doesn't >> vary from distribution to distribution. things just work. i got a >> baseline OS and i could layer applications onto it in an entirely >> separate mode of operation. What varies between Linux distros? I'd like to know more about that. Unless the BSD systems never change over time, you do have the problem of changes in new releases. Another point: Why should variation among Linux OSs be a problem for a user who uses only one of them? Why would you want to run a bunch of different BSD systems and switch between them? One obvious disadvantage of BSD systems is that they are not Linux -- if you try to use a Linux system you might have some problems because you are used to BSD. Mike