On Wed, 26 Oct 1994, Marc W. Mengel wrote:

> 
> In <199410252359.TAA07662@pain.lcs.mit.edu>  you write:
>     ... I keep hearing so much
>     about how linux is bad and netbsd is good. I'm not taking
>     any position here but i really would like to hear what's
>     wrong with linux and why is netbsd so good... I myself
>     have an amiga and will probably installa unix based os
>     as amigaos doesn't provide some of the functions i need
>     so any info would be most appriciated.
> 
> That can be a dangerous question to ask :-).  The good things and
> bad things about Linux are actually the same ones...
> 
> One good thing is that lots of people are hacking on it, and there are
> lots of drivers, etc. available.  The problem is that lots of people
> are working on it, so there are new releases weekly, stuff you get
> precompiled wasn't built right over half the time, and various pieces
> parts sometimes don't play well together.
> 
> In the more abstract design sense, one of the weaknesses of Linux is
> that data structures and system services are not abstracted via
> subroutine calls, hence code all over the kernel knows what the process
> table, etc.  looks like.  This means that changing these data
> structures is nearly impossible.  The NetBSD code has well insulated
> data structures which hide all the low level implementation details,
> hence they can be changed by fixing just the interface routines.
> 
> Once again, this is a good thing and a bad thing -- it's good because
> it makes the system easier to maintain and modify and debug, its bad
> because it makes the system slower with all the function call
> overhead.
> 
> Third, the NetBSD code was done with portability in mind, and the NetBSD
> team is maintaining NetBSD on 5 or 6 platforms now.  On the other hand,
> folks seem to be starting to have some luck with Linux ports to other
> platforms...
> 
> So the good things and bad things are the same things, it just depends
> how you look at them :-).
> 
> Marc
> 

	Hehe, what about FreeBSD?  Please only compare it to the version 
for the Intel platforms :-)


                              Cheers,
          		       Vince
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