Re: Linux Vs. FreeBSD

On 2005-12-08, Daveman750 <dsimcha@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Simple: Being able to see the source code is only an important
> personal, as opposed to collective, freedom, for the small minority of
> people who are actually programmers. On the other hand, compiling
> source code is annoyingly slow and relatively difficult when it cones
> to things such as build environments. It's nice to know that with free
> software, anyone can see the source code and is free to hack it, but
> given that I only have minimal programming skills, it really is of no
> use for me _personally_ to be able to see the source code, along with
> about 99% of other users. For us, binaries are just plain easier.

So, open source is only a _potential_ advantage to you. The
potential would be realized if you ever had a need to take
advantage of it.

> Elaborating on the whole binary compatibility thing, if you try to
> install something intended for one distro on another, different GCC
> versions, library versions, etc. make it virtually impossible, as I
> understand it. Debian vs. Fedora is actually a bad example, because
> they use different package managers. A better example would be Fedora
> vs. Suse. You usually can't install a Fedora package on Suse or vice
> versa. Correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but I can't imagine why
> else they would package things separately for each of these distros.
> This is an extreme pain in the you-know-what for users who don't want
> to compile source themselves and are using anything but the most
> popular, well-known distros.

When it comes to using the same package across distros,
YMMV. When I had an Alpha Linux machine, I used the same
version of the Applixware office package (binary only) on
several releases of RedHat for Alpha. When I had to
downgrade to X86, I bought three copies of Applixware via
Ebay. I used it with Redhat 8.0 and 9, then Mandrake 10.0
and LE2005 (alias 10.2). There are a couple of quirks with
display, but I'm not entirely sure that is a result of
running on a different distro.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@xxxxxxxxxxx
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)
.

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