FreeBSD
Slartibartfast
Global Moderator-__-
I know a few of you are Linux folks and understand that the Linux community is facing interesting times. Everything is currently a little confused and a lot of what was previously basic Linux methodology is soon going away.
I personally saw the writing on the wall a long time ago (as soon as GNOME3 came out) and ditched linux on the desktop a while back. I kept Debian on my servers for a while, but now I've moved them to FreeBSD. It's great.
It's honestly the most stable Unix OS I've ever used. The entire thing is (from the Kernel to the ls command) maintained by the same developers which means the entire OS is known, and things can be more integrated. They don't have to make provisions for "unknown unknowns".
As a result of the "whole OS" approach, things like the FreeBSD handbook can exist. This offers a great step by step guide to the OS. No Linux does this. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/
Ports is an elegant package management system as well. The best way to explain ports is to say it's an automatic package compiling system. An advantage of source package management is the ability to enable compile time options. for example, torrent support in elinks. There's also a binary package management system as well.
The entire networking stack is pretty good and if you're into building your own firewall, pf blows iptables out of the water.
There are other advantages like ZFS and Dtrace (none of which i use, due to reasons of resources).
There are of course negatives: Hardware support is not as good as Linux, wireless and graphics card support is patchy and the packaging system is sometimes messy - occasionally things break (but they're usually fixed within hours). Although performance is generally better it might not be discernibly better then Linux, it all depends on what you're doing.
Depending on your usage, you might not be impressed by FreeBSD but it's definitely worth trying out in a VM if you're a moderate to advanced Linux user.
I personally saw the writing on the wall a long time ago (as soon as GNOME3 came out) and ditched linux on the desktop a while back. I kept Debian on my servers for a while, but now I've moved them to FreeBSD. It's great.
It's honestly the most stable Unix OS I've ever used. The entire thing is (from the Kernel to the ls command) maintained by the same developers which means the entire OS is known, and things can be more integrated. They don't have to make provisions for "unknown unknowns".
As a result of the "whole OS" approach, things like the FreeBSD handbook can exist. This offers a great step by step guide to the OS. No Linux does this. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/
Ports is an elegant package management system as well. The best way to explain ports is to say it's an automatic package compiling system. An advantage of source package management is the ability to enable compile time options. for example, torrent support in elinks. There's also a binary package management system as well.
The entire networking stack is pretty good and if you're into building your own firewall, pf blows iptables out of the water.
There are other advantages like ZFS and Dtrace (none of which i use, due to reasons of resources).
There are of course negatives: Hardware support is not as good as Linux, wireless and graphics card support is patchy and the packaging system is sometimes messy - occasionally things break (but they're usually fixed within hours). Although performance is generally better it might not be discernibly better then Linux, it all depends on what you're doing.
Depending on your usage, you might not be impressed by FreeBSD but it's definitely worth trying out in a VM if you're a moderate to advanced Linux user.
Comments