>I can't speak to Linux on the pmax, but, in general, Linux is much closer to
>SysV than NetBSD is (duh!). For someone who isn't used to switching away
>from one flavor of Unix to another, and whose experience is SysV-based,
>using a BSD is likely to be *extremely* frustrating. That person is better
>served by Linux.

My experience was exactly the opposite. Nearly all of my UNIX experience
has been using System V at work (mostly, Solaris, Unixware, and before
that Unixware's ancestors, which were basically pure SysV), and for a
long time I ran a 386 with ISC System V at home. (I am not holding System
V up as an ideal, by any means; just pointing out that I match the
description of a person whose experience is SysV-based.)

Now my main home box runs NetBSD/pmax. I am much, *much* happier with
it than with my attempt, a year or so ago, to run Linux on a machine
five times as fast.

Yes, there are major differences between SysV and NetBSD in administration,
and a few in userland, but I found NetBSD easy to pick up, since it's well
organized and, for the most part, reasonably well documented.

It was Linux that I gave up in frustration, actually. (This was *before*
I ever touched NetBSD (or any contemporary BSD), by the way. I *wanted*
to like Linux, and I used it long enough that I contributed to the frame
buffer device driver for my machine.)  I didn't find Linux to be
particularly SysV-like. Yes, init is (or was in the variant I ran) like
System V, but that's about it. There were many, many differences from
what I was used to, with no apparent underlying structure, and not much
help from the documentation. System V has man pages, and I use them often;
Linux all too often had those FSF-rant placeholders, which may be what
finally pushed me to the final shutdown.

Obviously people's experiences vary, but to me NetBSD "feels" like a
"real UNIX" system, and consequently closer to SysV than is Linux,
which, to me, has the feel of a random collection of loosely UNIX-
inspired freeware. Linux constantly reminded me of that remark (see
fortune(6)) by Henry Spencer (which wasn't about Linux, was it?).

IMHO the people who would be best served by Linux on the pmax, or rather,
those who would *prefer* Linux on the pmax, are not those whose experience
is SysV-based, but those whose experience is purely Linux-based. That may
well be a larger market, though.

-- 
Kevin Schoedel
schoedel@kw.igs.net