Gentoo vs FreeBSD

[Raffi]

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]

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.

[placeholder]

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]

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]

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

Odd... that does not happen to me. :\

[justanothergentoofanatic]

Odd... that does not happen to me. :\

You've never had a script or a configuration setup that had to be changed since a new version of a program operated a bit differently?

-Mike

[spb]

Odd... that does not happen to me. :\

You're not trying to use it in enterprise.

[j79zlr]

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]

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.

[groovin]

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]

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.

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.

My system is an epox 8rda3+ (nforce2 ultra) and a simple google revealed exact instructions on installing a linux nvnet driver on freebsd which hasn't failed since it got installed. Apparently freebsd can even do windows nic drivers but I haven't used this feature in any way.

This brings me to the documentation. If you read some instruction on how to get something done for freebsd it will be correct to the last character because of it's cohesive nature, which isn't the case on linux (these gentoo forums help, but still isn't as consistent as fbsd).

Then maybe the 1 thing I found isn't up to scratch on freebsd is the sound on some programs. Owning an sblive! I get really good support on all platforms, but the sound on xmame is just totally terribly choppy, dunno if it's xmame's fault, the port or whatever. Turning the eq on xmms has a small delay (like windows' winamp) but apart from those things, sound is fine. Quake3, doom3 etc. all have sound working with no delay at all.

In short I like both systems, but freebsd seems to be my favorite for nearly everything I do with it cause it just works better. The linux-compatibility works as just a thin wrapper around the bsd kernel so there is no slowdown at all, on the contrary. This is very handy if you don't want to compile openoffice but just use the binary linux version.

I'll put my system specs on here just for the comparison value of the 'rant'.
Athlon-xp 2500+
512MB DDR 333MHz
GF3ti200
FreeBSD 5.3 with updated ports (meaning kde 3.3.2, x.org 6.8.1)
Gentoo on 2.6.10, nptl, prelinked, march=athlon-xp -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -s, kde 3.3.2, x.org 6.8.0-r3 (isn't this 6.8.1 as well ?)

[shredz]

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:

Code: Select all

-march=athlon-xp -Os -pipe

I read in another thread that execution times for modern desktop pc's are more I/O bound then cpu bound and on a 2+ GHz pc this seems very plausible.

[zenlunatic]

I wonder what's the best *BSD is to start with. FreeBSD has good documentation, but OpenBSD's POV on security really appeals me.

OpenBSD is designed to be secure by default and I believe a like-mined gnu/linux user could be similarly secure. However I do recognize the great things the project has done, such as openssh.

And yes netbsd runs on 50+ platforms, but most platforms are lacking major features such as virtual console support.

[shredz]

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]

And yes netbsd runs on 50+ platforms

This figure sounds far more impressive than it really is, since one Linux architecture == countless NetBSD platforms.

[titan100]

Well, they are very similar, but I prefer gentoo in my desktops, but just love freeBSD as a server. Thats my prefernce anyhow.

[SJR3t2]

Well, they are very similar, but I prefer gentoo in my desktops, but just love freeBSD as a server. Thats my prefernce anyhow.

Would you explain why you prefer having two systems instead of just learning one please.

Steven

[j79zlr]

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]

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]

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]

Odd... that does not happen to me. :\

You've never had a script or a configuration setup that had to be changed since a new version of a program operated a bit differently?

-Mike

Not blindly typing -5 would help you a great deal

[predatorfreak]

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).

[ryceck]

Hope this helps..

http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/bsd.html#gentoo-freebsd

Horribly outdated. Try this or this (also slightly outdated). Better yet, drop by #gentoo-bsd and ask me what the latest install method is.

This is wicked mate.... I am actually syncing portage on my fresh bsd install
I'll see if it keeps working :p
Thnx for the tip anyway

[Koon]

I would never run Gentoo on a server, portage is too unstable. If you want the security fixes, you have to unmask ~x86, and these can be about as broken as anything.

You don't have to unmask ~x86 to get security fixes. All vulnerabilities affecting x86 are fixed with packages in x86.

- Koon / Gentoo Linux Security

[Sigmatador]

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