Many BSDs v. Single Linux/etc

Many BSDs v. Single Linux/etc

Not to add flames to my favorite holy war - *BSD vs Linux performance - I'll post separately. Actually I just reiterate my over years sparse experience of BSD compared to dense Linux experience over last 6 years.

Linux is fast. Very very very fast. Until you hit a corner case.
*BSD are notoriously slower. (Some people tried to explain me that it was for sake of doing things 'right' - thou I'm not buying such arguments.) But for all my time, I never ever hit a corner case with Free/NetBSD.

I define corner case as situation, in which OS performance on some operation degrades so much, that it is faster to hit 'Reset' button and wait for fsck than to wait for operation to complete.

I will not be giving examples - this will just convert this thread into 'try this, try that' thing. And I know already all workarounds for all OSs.

But at times, I'm just getting sick of Linux dumbheadness and overly-optimistic optimizations. BSD does magnitude better job at actually testing OS before releases on corner cases. Linux? - it is never ever tested nor stress tested. Because most likely at date of release of test, Linux API was already changed what has invalidated any tested ever performed.

Wanna bleeding edge? - use Linux. Performance and over all good experience. Need performance? - go RedHat. Need good experience? - go Mandrake or Debian. Or Gentoo if you wanna both performance and positive experience.

Wanna stable system for particular task? - use BSD. Any of them would be Okay. The time you will invest into making it tuned for particular task will pay back: things wouldn't turn obsolete by time you will end reading man page.

Linux is never tested. It is only benchmarked - to prove its superiority. I had never heard of BSD being tested - but over all it look to be tested, petted and polished.

Linux is deployed widely. People always make that stupid 'single kernel for everything' argument for betterness of Linux. I'm working with embedded systems. I'm using at home Linux desktop. I've helped on numerous occasions setting up servers for various purposes: web, mail, printing, compilation farm.
None of the systems have had the same kernel. I'd rather say it was huge number of different Linux kernels. Very very different. Long list of differences is omitted.
If you take any particular task (or application field) where Linux is used, you will find that there is a vendor providing patched kernel.
And kernel always needs patching. 2.2/2.4 just didn't include all reaquired features/support for platforms. 2.6 is moving so fast, that I doubt anyone except developers can keep up.

The point I'm trying to make: Linux is already fragmented. Stop saying that there are many BSDs and single Linux. This is myth. I have expirienced more problems porting Linux applications between different kernel versions and different vendors, than I ever experienced problems porting application to any of *BSD with all their versions. (In fact, I did ported to BSD/Solaris just because it took almost no time.) With BSDs you can find documentation on deprecated features - and often documentation on how to upgrade. With Linux - well, go figure by yourself/read mail-lists - you normally not alone.

But may be I can be written off as an old timer...