For Bsd vs Linux flame wars, what was your experience on Linux instability? (what is exactly more stable?)
I'm referring to system and application stability. In Linux, everybody wants to reinvent the wheel, every 3-6 months. How many sound servers has Linux already had, how many boot up sequences has linux already had? Instead of working through the problems and making on service reliable and stable, they decide to start a complete new way of doing it! How consistent is system configuration between Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE etc? Not much, basically each distro must maintain there own knowledge base of info - making it very frustrating for the end-user. How good is system documentation for Linux distros - pretty terrible (Ubuntu is probably tops here). As for actual system stablity (as in system hangs, crashes etc). Ubuntu has gone through a terrible phase where each new release was worse than the one before. So much so, that I started looking at other Linux distros in the end.
FreeBSD on the other had solves all the above problems. Great documentation, consistent and stable configuration layout. Base OS stuff goes in /etc/ and ALL user installed stuff goes in /usr/local/etc/. FreeBSD has also been working on improving existing services - working through the problems, not just give up and start something new.
So for me personally, FreeBSD was a breath of fresh air. Great support, great up-to-date documentation, longer release cycles (making for more stable systems), better integration and testing between Base OS, Base Utilities. A consistent way of installing apps, allowing you to choose what features you want and reducing dependencies (no millions of package dependencies I so often found in Ubuntu Linux - eg: Installing FlameRobin forced me to install an older Firebird Library than I wanted to use).
I've installed my current FreeBSD 9.1 system two years ago. It runs 24-7 and has many server services running too - so not just a desktop. It is fantastic and stable! Never experienced a single system lock-up (not that I'm suggesting it isn't possible). It just keeps ticking along happily and allowing me to get on with my work. The way an OS should be! Plus ZFS (file system) sold me on the FreeBSD idea too. I'll never use any other file system again, as I have lost too much data too many times on the EXT2/3/4 Linux file systems.
Getting back to the topic at hand. I have looked at Haiku OS a few times over the years. Ran it on a laptop for a while. I was very very impressed with what it had on offer. It was very fast too - even on a low resource laptop. I love the user level attributes built into the file-system and desktop search tool. I hope they become a new OS contender some day.
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