Re: OpenBSD vs MS (non trivial)

[Nick Holland <nhollan@home.com>]

Here are some of my thoughts on your question (in no particular order,
other than the order they occurred to me 8)...

If Microsoft has a problem running on a particular piece of (say) Dell
hardware, Bill calls Mike, and Mike changes things.  If OpenBSD has a
problem with a particular piece of (say) Dell hardware, Theo calls a
tech support drone, and while the drone will undoubtedly end up
quaking in their shoes, change is unlikely.

MS has considerable direct influence on hardware design.  Check out
the PC98 or similar hardware design specs.  Non-MS OSs have to
basically adapt to what MS/Intel/hardware manufacturers have dictated,
and do so without full support of the hardware manufacturers.  

If you wish to compare apples to Apples (sorry), you really should be
looking at Windows NT/2000 compared to *Unix, not Win9x.  The reason
is PCs are designed to boot DOS.  They work very hard to do it.  The
PC BIOS smoothes over MANY problems of hardware compatibility for
Windows 9x.  Wrong disk driver?  No biggie!  16 bit mode!  Disk,
keyboard, and basic video is all provided by BIOS routines that are
accessible to a DOS derived OS like Windows 9x, whereas a 32 bit OS
has to provide its own support for these functions, and it has to
provide it perfectly for any possible combination of hardware.  Talk
to experienced NT/2000 people, they will tell you something that isn't
well recognized by those of us that just dabble with The Beast when
forced to: you must respect that "Hardware compatibility list" MS
publishes.  If it is on there, it stands a prayer of working, if not,
you will probably be unhappy.  The list is very finite, BTW. 
Suddenly, the Unix-Like OS hardware compatibility issues look less
limiting.

On a related note, the hardware situation for PCs is incredibly
chaotic.  I'm not a Sun expert, but I'd rather guess that there are
more flavors of products _just_ from 3Com which have _just_ the
"Etherlink III" tag on 'em then there are different NICs that will
work in a Sparc.  The strain this puts on a small development team has
got to be unimaginable.  Again, remember that if (say) the 3c589D has
compatibility problems with a driver written for the 3c589B, 3Com will
bend over backwards to fix the problem in Windows, and may or may not
disclose any information needed to small OS project developers.  You
can easily buy a new computer, install a ten year old NIC, and whine
up a storm that OpenBSD doesn't support everything perfectly.  There
aren't too many platforms where you could end up with literally
hundreds of different video cards, hundreds of different NICs, dozens
of different controlling chipsets, etc.  I'd rather guess that with
just the choice of hardware available at the local computer
superstore, you could probably create computers with enough variety
that you could give a different one to each and every human on the
planet.  It is amazing this stuff works at all.

No one grabs an old 486/33 Packard Bell, a 3G HD that came out of
Compaq, and 16M of mismatched SIMMs and expects to load Windows 2000
on it.  Yet, they would expect to be able to load OpenBSD on it.  The
point here is a lot of weird junk gets tossed together for OpenBSD,
whereas no one would dream of doing that for a "Mainstream" OS.  This
is one advantage to bloating your OS to the limits of currently
available hardware: you don't have to worry about support of old
hardware. 8)  (BTW, most of the "fdisk /mbr" problems I have seen have
had to do with moving HDs from one box to another box, can't say I've
seen it myself on a "virgin" HD on a new machine.  On the other hand,
virgin HDs are rather hard to come by in my scrap piles 8-).

I've also noted a lot of people make their purchasing decisions based
on things other than the application they will be putting the machine
to.  This is really bizarre.  How many times have we seen on this list
"I just bought a xxxxxxx model yyyyyy to run OpenBSD on and it isn't
working".  There are reasons that hardware compatibility lists are
published, people...  Buy something that isn't on the Windows NT/2000
hardware compatibility list, see how much sympathy you get from
Microsoft.  If you are an OpenBSD developer, go ahead, buy something
based on looks or numbers or whatever, make it work.  The rest of us,
well, we had best be familiar with the hardware compatibility list
before we buy stuff.

Nick.

Alfred Breull wrote:
> 
> i'm looking for books, pointers explaining (-h, humanly) the
> basical difference/-s between unices and microsoft osses. is
> it the '4.4 bsd operating system' or are there better choices ?
> 
> i understood that unices allow users more freedom (and errors <g>),
> when compared to i.e microsoft osses, or more stability, speed etc.
> 
> however, often enough 'fdisk /MBR' is suggested in pc's or win98
> etc install fine while openbsd doesn't.
> 
> i'd like to understand (1) the basical 'why s' and (2) the reasons
> on 'why it is sometimes less problematic to rely on microsoft's
> solutions (i.e. fdisk /MBR example) than on openbsd's ' (absolutely
> no flame intended).
> 
> thank you.

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