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I've read a lot of times saying that FreeBSD is superior to Linux, and less bloated. Is there more to this?

Mac OS X = BSD, but cooler.
So nyah

Slartibartfast wrote:I've read a lot of times saying that FreeBSD is superior to Linux, and less bloated. Is there more to this?

Yeah (average distro vs. FBSD, since Linux only refers to kernel), but it's falling behind... I've heard FreeBSD 5 doesn't have good SMP (not an issue for desktop users), plus the nVidia drivers are inferior to Linux.

One could switch to Debian, Slack, or Gentoo for removal of bloat though.

ggs wrote:Actually you have confused a few issues.

Probably. I do know that accessing memory out of your allocated space tends to cause a segfault.

You missed a few of the subtleties or the book was just wrong.

Okay, I probably missed them, since I skimmed over it trying to see which instructor was correct in regards to threading in Linux and pretty much stopped when I got the answer. (The answer being, by the way, that the instructor for the Operating Systems course was wrong while the professor that tought the Object Oriented Programming course last semester was correct.)

I take it most is essentially correct regarding Windows having an interface
with less overhead than X?

Linux itself doesn't seem slow. I could smoothly play video files (DivX, QuickTime, etc) using Xine on RedHat 8 that were literally slideshows in Windows 98 on the same PII-233.

Well, now that X is being developed by the X.org Foundation, they're finally doing stuff to it (so we won't have to wait for the glacial pace of development that the XFree86 people did).

One of their big priorities, from what I've seen, is increasing performance as well as bringing X up to date in terms of features.

Update: I installed Mandrake 10.0 on a Dell Dimension XPS T600 (600MHz Pentium-3, 512MB RAM, 30GB HD) last night. It runs great, and I installed it with full bloat: server daemons galore, KDE, every major app group, all development libraries, the whole works. I even tried playing a DVD (after installing libdvdcss, of course) and it played beautifully at full resolution, using only about 30% CPU power.

So, in other words, the person who installed Linux on a 600MHz/512MB box and said it ran like molasses is either full of shit or grossly exaggerating.