On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:32:15 -0700, Scrap Happy wrote:
One of the great strengths of *BSDs over other OSs is its good documentationand its clear design.Also there is the hardware universality claim, "Of course it runs on NetBSD". Not many contemporary systems run on a Sparc 2.I think you'll find that Linux variants run on far more contemporary *iron*. I suspect this is more important to the vast majority of users than support for 4m/4c machines, etc.
Indeed; but the key difference here is "variants." Linux (wherever you got it from, e.g. tarballs, git:, ...), doesn't come with a tool chain for cross compilation, image building, documentation (for porting) or even regression tests. People tend to forget that their favorite distros isn't just "Linux" but a bunch of other stuff made around, and that it does not really match other operating systems also labelled as being Linux.
Typically, when you want to move from the hobbyist side to a more mainstream system, that part isn't really trivial (from a license perspective also: the issue isn't an engineering effort only). It's not just about top-recent hardware support; there are OS out there that chose to support fewer hardware, but are still highly successful considering their relative market share.
-- Jean-Yves Migeon jeanyves.migeon%free.fr@localhost