Losing Her to GNU

Dear Trollaxor,

My girlfriend has been hanging around the wrong sorts lately, and has been coming home talking about Linux and using a ton of buzzwords I know she barely understands. I'm a FreeBSD user and know better than to fall in with the GNU crowd. How can I convince my girlfriend, who is falling further and further into groupthink everyday, to see the light before it's too late?

Losing Her to GNU

Dear Gentle Sir:

First, let's get this right out into the open. I'm on to you. I know you dirty GNU hippies are always looking for ways to push Linux and that sneaky reverse-propaganda is not below you—you're even willing to sling a little mud on yourself to do so. As cool as FreeBSD is, especially when compared to Linux, its users do not have girlfriends. So that right away revealed your question to me as an insidious lie. I will not assist you by giving you the answer you asked for. You'd just reverse engineer it and use it to push Linux down our throats.

Secondly, just give it up. FreeBSD is better than Linux in so many ways I won't even go into it here. FreeBSD 4.4 breaks all known Linux benchmarks, and is used in serious serving situations—Apple.com, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. However, I will give you a very stinging, ironic instance where FreeBSD outshines Linux in server performance.

The threading model native in FreeBSD is the same that MySQL uses, so MySQL performs around 23% faster under FreeBSD on identical hardware than it does under Linux. So what? you ask. Well, here's the other shoe dropping: SLASH, and therefore Slashdot, uses MySQL! So Slashdot, the premier Linux propaganda site, would actually perform better usingFreeBSD than the operating system it claims is the best thing to happen to humanity since fire! Slashdot is hobbled by the operating systems it champions to legions of pillow-biters everyday!