*BSD News Article 38005


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From: mbandy@superdec.uni.uiuc.edu (Harf)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why *BSD's have smaller user base ? [WAS: Can we quit with "Linux Sucks" ?]
Date: 15 Nov 1994 02:04:38 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
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Message-ID: <3a94vm$gns@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
References: <3a9205$bqj@mall.sinica.edu.tw>
NNTP-Posting-Host: superdec.uni.uiuc.edu

ywliu@beta.wsl.sinica.edu.tw () writes:

>  As Jordan posted here, I just wonder why *BSD's have fewer users. I don't
>think A-is-betther-than-B is the answer. It must have be some other historical
>factors, rather than technical ones. 

>  I wasn't aware of the existence of Linux until last October so I didn't know 
>how it's got its user base. 

>  Does anybody has any idea ?

	For one thing, there's a lot more documentation around for Linux outside
the man pages, and for another, installing *BSD is much harder than installing
Linux (although I installed FreeBSD-2.0-ALPHA about an hour ago and it wasn't
bad at all).  People use Linux because it's more friendly and easy to use for
most people who don't have a whole lot of experience administrating and using
UNIX-like systems.

	-- Matt Bandy <mbandy@uni.uiuc.edu>