On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, Erik E. Fair wrote:

> I was looking at the SETI@Home statistics today and noticed a high number
> of SunOS systems participating, and the thought struck me - why aren't
> these people running NetBSD instead? We're better, right? Modern TCP/IP
> stack, 64-bit clean FFS, and so on. I bet they're just not aware of us.


> So, if we were going to put together an article/web page/etc that compares
> and contrasts SunOS 4.1.4 (the last one, AFAIK) and NetBSD 1.4.1, what
> would we say? How are we better?

SunOS 4.1.4 (the last of the BSD SunOS's) is what I started learning on.
It made learning NetBSD pretty easy.  Some nice things about NetBSD vs
SunOS that I found were (in no particular order)

1)  /etc/rc.conf and other /etc/*.conf.  When we got this (in 1.2 IIRC),
    it was much nicer than the old hacks to rc and rc.local.

2)  Packages!!  For me this is a huge bonus.  I know when I want to build
    a web server or a proxy web server or a samba server or whatever, I
    know I'm not going to spend a ton of time fixing up someone elses
    sources.

3)  Better support, continuing support.  Bugs in SunOS4.1.4 are there to
    stay.  Does SunOS4.1.4 support my scanner?  My guess is no.

4)  compat_svr4.  I can run solaris binaries from a BSD platform.


bad things for me about NetBSD vs SunOS:

1)  We had a very key program at work that ran under SunView (or
    openwindows in SunView compat mode).  Sun tried to make us "upgrade"
    to solaris, but they couldn't figure out how to make this program run
    so we stayed with sunos4.1.4.  My brother tried running SunView a few
    years back under NetBSD with no success.  One of these days (months) I
    may try again and dig into why. 

well, thats actually it for this side of the comparison.