What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Joao Barros]

On 10/15/06, William Tracy <afishionado at gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay.
>
> I've installed FreeBSD on my desktop. I got KDE working, and Amor is
> running so I have a little daemon sitting on my window. I can mount my
> USB card reader and open the pictures from my digital camera in Gimp.
> I can browse the web in Firefox. I even compiled my own kernel so that
> I'm all 1337. :-)
>
> Overall, I like FreeBSD--the kernel build process felt a lot smoother
> than Linux, the /boot and /sys file heirarchies makes more sense to me
> than /boot and /usr/src under Linux, and the /dev heirarchy seems
> sane, though it's still pretty alien to me. So far, everything I do
> under Linux I can do under FreeBSD.
>
> FreeBSD is nice, but I haven't seen anything really *compelling* about
> it. FreeBSD might be more stable as a server, but for my desktop Linux
> has proven more than stable enough. (X crashes sometimes, but FreeBSD
> can't really fix that.) The extra file flags look intersting, but
> otherwise I haven't seen anything that I can do under FreeBSD that I
> can't with Linux.
>
> So, basically, I'm asking you guys to wow me. :-) Show me how FreeBSD
> can outdo Linux. Make me never want to go back.
>
> William Tracy

Well, I guess you can ask yourself some questions:
- Is there something now that you can't do but were able to using
Linux (or vice-versa) ?
- Hardware support (might fit the previous question)
- Is performance better/worse ?
- Your global experience with it: installation, usage, documentation, support.

>From my experience, I was using linux before FreeBSD, but I always
felt curiosity to test it.
My first try was with 5.0 and although slow at the time (processing
apache logs with awstats) I loved it. Two things come out shining:
it's a complete OS not a kernel glued with userland and libraries and
the documentation is supreme.

Just my 2 euro cents ;-)

-- 
Joao Barros