Gentoo vs FreeBSD

Raffi · l33t Joined: 17 Mar 2003 Posts: 731 Location: Moscow, Id.

OK. You have a point about volume

. I should have limited my comment to say the things I have looked up in each.

One place their page count rises is they cover a lot of pages talking about the many different ways to update your system. With Gentoo, there is portage and emerge. It works on everything. I personally find that a plus for Gentoo, but others see the separation as a plus for FreeBSD.

monotux · Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 2:38 am Post subject:

There is one great thing with gentoo, compared to the other big linux distros - and that is, these forums!
It doesn't matter what your problem is - it has already been encountered, documented and solved.
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placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

I recently installed FreeBSD and then uninstalled it because it did not have drivers for my nForce2 Ethernet card, or at least not any that did not involve lots of screwing around. What I used of it was nice though.

P.S. - If anyone knows where I can get some nForce2 Ethernet drivers for FreeBSD please point it out so that I can use it.

justanothergentoofanatic · Guru Joined: 29 Feb 2004 Posts: 337

In my opinion, the show stopper for Gentoo is the lack of backported security fixes. You always have to upgrade to fix security bugs, and upgrades often break things.

-Mike

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

justanothergentoofanatic · Guru Joined: 29 Feb 2004 Posts: 337

spb · Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 1:31 pm Post subject:

j79zlr · Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2005 7:41 am Post subject:

Here's two good example of ebuilds breaking, indent-2.2.9-r2 marked stable on x86 has a bad patch. Was this tested before being marked stable? Obviously not. That is my biggest pet peeve with Gentoo, rush things into portage without proper testing. Would it be so difficlut to make sure it actually builds before it gets marked stable?

solidsnake · n00b Joined: 04 Jan 2005 Posts: 1

Well it seems clear that Gentoo is _not_ the epitome of stability or security but as someone has already said in this thread, a great plus for Gentoo is this forums. Honestly, I wouldn't have stayed with Gentoo if not for the forums.

Besides, I'm not so used to FreeBSD so WHY BOTHER when I can perfectly handle myself in gnu/linux? I mean, I've used from Slackware to Debian to Gentoo and I've had my problems, but none was so extreme to make me go on to *BSD just because gnu/linux is now a "n00b" OS. Anytime I've changed systems, it has been much more of a commodity than a necessity. I would still be in the Debian world but portage has a lot of things that makes my life easier, that's why I'm in Gentoo. The day another distro makes things easier (without dumbing things up like the redhats, mandrakes, etc.) then consider me a goner. Oh of course, if I was familiar with FreeBSD maybe I would be using it now, but I doubt it. First I don't find it necessary to learn a new system when Linux already fulfills all my needs, it's plain stupid to go now to FreeBSD _just because_!

At least we should have in mind that no system is perfect, and that the strong points of one OS may not be the strong points of another. For me it's not about what's better but about what's more confortable right now for me.

BTW I think I should point out I'm not a server admin, I use my PC as a Desktop mainly, then services are added as extra features.
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groovin · Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2005 11:51 pm Post subject:

i first started usiing gentoo because portage was so similar to ports and i was already using FreeBSD for many things. while playing around with gentoo, i really started liking it... not so much because of the optmizations, but because of the amount of choices and control i got from it... on the level of control, i felt gentoo was very freebsd like as well.

anyways, i use gentoo at work and at home. at work, i have gentoo on a dozen servers... yes gentoo is bleeding edge, but that doesnt mean it cannot be stable for server use. i still use FreeBSD on gateways and vpn routers, and it's always been solid.

shredz · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 5:26 pm Post subject:

I'm running both systems at the moment (had gentoo since 3 years or so from 1.4 rc and freebsd 5.3 since a few weeks). I use my pc as a desktop environment for most every-day tasks, programming, watching movies/dvd's, playing games (ID soft mostly) etc...

Frankly freeBSD beats the living daylights out of gentoo. KDE feels so much snappier on freebsd and I didn't have to tweak any silly cflag, nptl or prelinking to do this, it just was like this with the standard settings. Same goes for any other application in there. I get better framerates on games too (enemy territory, doom3), which is weird considering my nvidia geforce3 runs linux glx drivers on fbsd and the games are also static linux versions.

Upgrading is very painless as well (granted, only had it for a few weeks but upgraded kde and x.org already in that time), bsd-STABLE has packages that are generally a version ahead of portage's stable and the system has only been solid as the mount everest.

I don't have any bad experience with gentoo, it works well, fast, portage owns etc. but after this short while with freebsd I must say that managing the useflags and what packages I want (like quicktime on mozilla) to work takes some effort which isn't the case on freeBSD, things just work the way they are supposed to. Using make files instead of emerge also means you can turn the pc off halfway the openoffice compile for instance, boot up in the morning and make will just continue where it left off (emerge --resume starts from the beginning of the build it was doing), nifty if your pc is near your bed.

shredz · Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 11:53 am Post subject:

For the sake of the argument and my own dislike of moving operating systems about on my system, possibly breaking everything up I decided to give it a test run and compile the whole gentoo again with gcc 3.4.3-r1 and flags that are a lot less dramatic:

zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

shredz · Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2005 6:24 pm Post subject:

Having looked into this before making my choice (well kinda, I always liked the beastie logo

), I'd think freebsd is the most obvious to get into, the install was certainly easy enough (see rant above).
If you want to use your pc as something of a desktop workstation I think you're gonna run into a lot of difficulties with openBSD just because it is so darn tight. freebsd was optimized for x86 performance, netbsd to run on many platforms (dunno about performance) and dragonfly BSD is a fork of freebsd and supposedly has good performance as well, be it somewhat experimental.

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

titan100 · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 61

Well, they are very similar, but I prefer gentoo in my desktops, but just love freeBSD as a server. Thats my prefernce anyhow.
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SJR3t2 · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 12:40 am Post subject:

j79zlr · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 2:01 am Post subject:

Linux and FreeBSD are different systems, but they share alot. If you know Linux, you won't find FreeBSD all that challenging to learn, and vice versa. They aren't mutually exclusive.

ncarbon · n00b Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 20

At home I have FreeBSD 5.1, fast, RELIABLE, and very easy to move around in. Setup is easy, and configs intuitive. Gentoo, albeit I am running AMD64 is a 'roll your sleeves up' and get down to business OS, alittle tough, but you have to learn and read, which is good. I have SCO Openserver 5.05 at work,
RELIABLE but the file structure is like spahghetti and just not intuitive.

But working with all three I have learned alot, and in each arena
there are things I enjoy and there are things I don't. But it is all about learning.

Ned

shredz · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 9:36 pm Post subject:

Well I'm done testing this stuff mostly. Recompiled the whole gentoo system with -Os -march=athlon-xp -pipe -s and prelinked the lot. Didn't make much difference, still getting owned by freeBSD. Then it hit me that freeBSD was on a 10 GB partition and gentoo 75 GB, so I resized gentoo's reiser to 40 GB, installed 2.6.10-gentoo-r4 kernel and now both systems are on par for speed in all departments. Mind you hdparm -t reports the gentoo hard disc which is physically different from the one bsd is on to be twice as fast on raw reading (58 meg / sec vs. 27 meg / sec). So I don't know if copying freebsd to the faster drive will give it an extra boost or not.

On the count of gaming, doom 3 reports an identical fps for a timedemo on both systems. It's weird cause gentoo gets higher fps on many scenes but freebsd doom3 feels somewhat smoother and more consistent. Either way I agree with the above comment that gentoo is more a 'roll up the sleeves' OS and freebsd is more like smooth sailing. Just consider the fact that you have to go through use flag tweaking, prelinking, cflag editing to get gentoo running at the same speed proves this point imo.

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2071

predatorfreak · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 2:30 am Post subject:

From what I've seen, FreeBSD 5.3 is by far the slowest of all three of the BSD's. From the benchmarks I've seen NetBSD beats it hands down in nearly everything and OpenBSD is also quite speedy. Now then, I personaly just switched to Gentoo and so far I love it. But, I rest solely on the "*BSD > *" philosphy. I do use Linux and I do love it, but i strongly believe that the *BSD kernel is more mature, stabler and overall better. Also, on the FreeBSD is just the BSD kernel with GNU utils stuff, that's completely untrue. FreeBSD uses its own set of tools that come from the orginal Bell Labs UNIX(r) (I believe).
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ryceck · Apprentice Joined: 13 Jan 2004 Posts: 195

Koon · Retired Dev Joined: 10 Dec 2002 Posts: 518

Sigmatador · n00b Joined: 26 Sep 2004 Posts: 19

i'm using gentoo on my desktops and openbsd on my servers, and nothing can make me change my mind ^^