3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
11:42 a.m.
If you run a current release of a software system, you
have to expect
that it needs at least a halfway current hardware to run on.
See, that's one of the things I find broken about NetBSD: this wasn't
true of NetBSD ten years ago. It mostly wasn't true of NetBSD five
years ago. But, in recent years, NetBSD has gotten sloppy, no longer
letting their old-hardware ports keep them honest with respect to doing
things right instead of just hitting them with Moore's Law.
If you have really old hardware you have to accept
that current
software will run slow.
And that's what's wrong - well, that's one of the things that's wrong -
with "current software". "WordStar on a 4.077MHz 8086 could keep up
with my typing. WinWord under Windows on a 300 MHz Pentium II can't."
I saw that quote attributed to Seth Briedbart, of Briedbart Index fame
(though I've never verified the authenticity of the attribution).
It's also not really true; it amounts to painting all "current
software" with the same brush, which is about as false (and as true) as
any other such broad-strokes summary.
Nevertheless: NetBSD is still compact and efficient in
comparision to
most Linux distributions.
That's a bit like saying that a wheelchair is fast compared to a tree
sloth.
It is also not tainted with some Linuxisms like
systemd...
...instead, it's tainted with other Linuxisms like v3 of the GPL.
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