[967] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Re: NetBSD vs. Linux
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Jul 18 20:56:20 1996
To: "Adam L. Taylor" <ataylor@cs.ucsd.edu>
Cc: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 18 Jul 1996 17:43:08 PDT."
<31EEDA1C.41C6@cs.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 20:52:19 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> After reading your description of the pro's and con's of NetBSD
> vs. Linux, it sounds like NetBSD has a lot to recommend it. So why
> are people so ga-ga about Linux?
Linux is used much more widely outside of MIT.
Linux supports more PC hardware.
Linux gets along with the PC partition table scheme a little better
than NetBSD, although that's largely hidden by MIT-local hacks.
Linux is starting to get native versions of commercial application
software. NetBSD will generally run such binaries under emulation,
but there isn't enough of a market to make it worth selling NetBSD
native applications.
Linux may be a little more memory-efficient (although its scheduling
and page replacement algorithms apparently sucked in 1.2.x, supposedly
much better in 2.x) because of some NetBSD virtual memory system bugs
that haven't been fixed. (They aren't major, but they'll affect your
machine's stability if you're low on both memory and swap space.)
I prefer NetBSD myself (I haven't listed the disadvantages of Linux),
but it tends to be a bit behind on the PC platform.
