Perils of the road less taken. Last month, Chad Dickerson wrote:
With Linux approaching ho-hum status in its ubiquity and MySQL getting its fair share of attention these days, there are still a few open source projects out there that sometimes slip under the hype radar...The free BSD derivatives -- FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD -- have been around for years and deserve consideration alongside Linux. [Chad Dickerson's Weblog
That's true. But as I was reminded yesterday, stepping off the Linux path can lead to serious headaches. A system on which I deploy some Zope-based applications used to run BSDI, and now runs FreeBSD. Building Python and Zope on the box was a lot trickier than it would have been on Linux, just because FreeBSD is the road less taken. I'd pretty much forgotten about that until yesterday, when I decided to add an XSLT processor to the mix. That proved way harder than it should have been.
... [Jon's Radio]
You know, I used to be one of those people that enjoyed getting stuff to work on FreeBSD and alternative OSes. However, I'm not any more. I toatally agree with Jon and I've had similar experiences. The reason I don't run FreeBSD any more is because the Java port has been so slow to catch up with the current JDK.
With IBM's intense backing of Linux, RedHat partnering with people like Oracle, and other corporate interest in Linux, it's getting easier and easier to live in the Linux world. Perhaps that is what is making it ho-hum. But, as I said yesterday, I'm running Linux at work on my desktop right now and loving it.
10:12:20 AM 
|
|
