Linux and BSD for the desktop: a comparative analysis.

Copyright © 1999 David Jorm

Starting on my first PC about 3 years ago, I ran a shonky Microsoft platform, as was the default. I quickly grew weary of its instabilities and migrated to Linux, Slackware 3.3 initially. I had no X11, no mouse and no idea in the world what I was doing. Some friends moved me over to RedHat 5.1 (the latest release at the time) and I instantly fell in love with X. I tinkered with new window managers and themes and was working on AfterStep and WindowMaker themes within 6 months. X11 had major usability issues back then, such as lack of widget standardization, lack of file managers, and, most importantly, lack of any usable applications. This rapidly changed with the advent of GNOME and KDE.

Around this time a friend became heavily involved in the OpenBSD project and I was inherently curious. I moved my old sparc1 to OpenBSD and a 486 to NetBSD. I immediately noticed the lack of user friendly X configuration tools and it took me a good few months to establish a usable X server on the 486. I also noticed my BSD boxes offered unparalleled stability and speed, even compared to my beloved Linux machines. So this presented a dilemma: something better, yet nearly unusable, or something usable yet second rate?

BSD systems gradually began to improve their X support and by the time of OpenBSD 2.4 and NetBSD 1.3.3 things were getting notably better. However, binary packages of anything at all even remotely up to date were impossible to obtain, CVS source failed to compile completely even after a huge array of GNU tools had been implemented at its demand, and release source packages still commonly failed to build. I turned to the friend who had initially spawned my interest in BSD. He worked at removing the 'linuxisms' from X packages sources and issued me some working source tarballs. Finally, nearly a year after first installing it, I had a friendly GNOME/GTK+ setup on my BSD machines. But all that effort? I'd had enough trouble working friends through the relatively tame waters of Linux, I could never convince people to use this. I concede RedHat developers and the like are largely to blame by including these 'linuxisms' in their code, but the BSD community as a whole cannot absolve itself of responsibility.

Although I do not use FreeBSD (lack of multiple architectures != useful), it is beginning to get up there with Linux systems in this regard; usable binary packages of recently released software packages are readily available and usable, and X installs come with a standard installation rather than manual implementation of umpteen tools and libraries.

The point? The BSD community has a fantastic kernel and foundation product, far out-stripping any other UNIX-like system on the market. If more user-friendly and X-based solutions could be implemented, the lucrative desktop market that Linux is beginning to crack could become a viable target.

David Jorm, jorm@goldweb.com.au