Now that I work with a bunch of Linux folks, and also have to admin a bunch of Linux boxes, I get a pretty good perspective as to the differences between Linux distributions. In turn, I get to remind myself just how nice it is having only one FreeBSD.

The remainder of this article isn't going to be a "use FreeBSD because it's better" type of things. Instead, it's going to focus on one of the reasons why having only one FreeBSD is is better than having 100+ Linux distributions.

The thing that inspired this article was a recent conversation on one of our employee-only IRC channels. One of the guys was having problems setting up printing on his Linux box. He uses Debian. Two other guys, who were in the channel at the time, use Mandrake. Watching them try to help the Debian user got to be somewhat funny:

Debian user: I'm using lpr.

Mandrake user #1: Install CUPS, it's really simple to use.

Mandrake user #2: You could always port RedHat's printtool.

Debian user: There's a payware package that I hear works easily. It might even be worth buying if it saves me the headache.

What I found amusing is that no one -- even though they were all Linux users who had set up printing and have been using it successfully -- had a useful answer. With FreeBSD, this wouldn't happen because there is only one FreeBSD, and setting up printing will be the same, no matter what.

In my opinion, what good is it screaming "I RUN LINUX" when you can't help someone else running Linux because they use a different distribution? It seems somewhat pointless. For example, if you've set up printing on FreeBSD, you should be able to help someone else trying to set up printing on FreeBSD. It's that simple.

So, while you Linux users are running around screaming rabidly about how cool you are because you run Linux and how great Linux is, I'll be out helping others use FreeBSD because it doesn't matter what distribution they run. There's only one FreeBSD, and we like it that way.

Later,

- jim

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