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BSD's philosophy of shipping things out as a "total package" is a two edged sword -- you end up with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and of course, NetBSD, each with a different kernel, hence OpenBSD just now supporting SMP.

Linux uses a different philosophy, which unbundles the kernel, allowing many distributions, all using the same kernel base. This has advantages of course: in a general sense you get more bang for the buck -- all distributions benefit from kernel enhancements, whereas you have FreeBSD kernel developers, OpenBSD kernel developers, and NetBSD kernel developers.

As a result, there are by definition fewer troops to look at each type of kernel. If you have lower market share, this can be really bad news.

Using RedHat4.1 and Slackware as comparison points for Linux is not terribly fair. Any BSD would have been better than those relics. But modern Linux distributions have become astonishingly slick, and things *really* work out of the box these days, wifi, even SATA.

Back in the old days i used to have to recompile the kernel to support NFS servering for example, now it all happens automatically, since about RedHat7.3. The RedHat or SuSe automatic net based install tools are also getting *really* nice. It means that it takes only about 2 minutes (not a typo) of my time to setup and install a new machine -- i type in a couple of commands on the installation server, boot up the new machine with a special CD-ROM, and walk away. The installation is automatic from that point forward.

All anaconda and python based...

So, if you hurl flotsam in my direction, i'll hurl jetsam right back!! cheers...

You bring up some excellent points! Yep, the three main BSD's have certainly drifted in their own directions, though for good reason - Each project has a different primary focus: FreeBSD strives to be the most stable operating system, NetBSD strives to run on the largest number of platforms, and OpenBSD seeks to be more secure than any other OS. The projects do still share code between each other from time to time, so any feature lag is primarily self-inflicted. If one of the features developed by one of the *BSD's ends up looking attractive to the others, they pick it up quickly - FreeBSD has taken quite a bit of security-related fixes from OpenBSD, for example.

The Linux philosophy isn't limited to itself - Check out the Debian/FreeBSD project, which runs the FreeBSD kernel underneath the standard Linux (GNU) utilities. It's kinda scary! :)

I understand that RH41 and Slackware aren't a really great comparison, but at the time I made the switch from Linux to BSD, that was the "most stable" Linux flavors. I think RH51 had been out for a month, and wasn't much improved over RH41. After many hours of frustration, I booted FreeBSD, and haven't really looked back since. I've messed around with some of the latest RedHat releases (RH9 and Fedora), and while they look very attractive, underneath the hood, they still have the same managability problems I saw in the past. If you want to see a dependency nightmare, try running Oracle 9i RAC on top of OCFS. It's certified against RedHat Advanced Server 2.5 (I think the RHAS 3 certification just came out recently), but it is nearly impossible to install, due to the number of items (INCLUDING THE KERNEL) which need to be downgraded and rebuilt.

Granted, it's most likely Oracle's problem related to the way OCFS was written, but I find it humorous to know that it's possible to write third-party Linux kernel drivers which will only build against ONE SINGLE version of the kernel. (The FreeBSD kernel API doesn't change very frequently, so the same source will typically last you quite a few releases more than it would if it were written for Linux.)

I dunno - Which OS you select certainly amounts to preference. I come from a script-oriented, command-line, software-engineering background, so I prefer the administration and upgrade tools which ship with FreeBSD. If I want to install a package, it's usually as simple as running the command "pkg_add -r (package_name)," and the package is downloaded and installed (including all dependencies). Therefore, being someone who doesn't like to use GUI tools (like RedHat up2date), I am destined to stick with BSD.

Out of curiosity - have you tried FreeBSD 5.2.1 before? The installer still sucks (sorry - any Linux runs circles around our installer, you've definitely gotten me there), but once you get it up and running, I guarantee that it's the most maintainable operating system you'll ever see! (To give you an idea of how maintainable it is, I've been running FreeBSD on a PPro since 1998. This server's been upgraded from version 2.2.6 all the way up to version 5.1. I never had an upgrade toast my computer, never lost any data on the box due to feature creep, never had to worry about fetching an obtuse version of a library to get something to work - Everything just worked out of the box. Perhaps not the best example, but it's been my experience anyway.... :) )