What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Jonathan Horne]

On Sunday 15 October 2006 17:26, William Tracy 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

ill tel you why i switched from linux to freebsd.

first, the release schedule.  or rather... the length of the maintenance 
calendar.  freebsd maintains the core operating system longer than any linux 
distro ive ever seen.  i was previously on fedora,  and their EOL schedule 
came so quickly some times, that in order to maintain security, a complete 
operating system upgrade was necessary.  this was in part due to the rpm 
system, which doesnt necessarily prefer to install another versions rpms into 
a newer or older version of the OS.  (if im wrong there, too bad, ive already 
switched to freebsd, and im not going back, so dont bother to correct me.... 
*wink*).

second, (and this part, im only going to use estimations, im not going to look 
up version info for each release), what was the latest version of 
[application] in FC5?  FC4?  FC3?  on back?  ok.. for the sake of example i 
will go and look up one... well take apache for example.
FC5 - httpd-2.2.2-1.2.i386.rpm
FC4 - httpd-2.0.54-10.4.i386.rpm
FC3 - httpd-2.0.53-3.3.i386.rpm
FC2 - httpd-2.0.51-2.9.i386.rpm
in freebsd, i can have the latest 2.0.59 on my system, no matter if im running 
6.1, 6.0, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3...  same thing goes for practically anything else you 
can think of that you want to run.  note that FC5 upgrades you to 2.2.x, and 
me, i dont know alot about apache, but i do know that my httpd.conf file 
doesnt work right in 2.2.x, but works perfectly for what i need in 2.0.x.  
not being forced into a version that is not right for me, is something i 
like.

i dont know how to make my own rpm files (yes i know i could learn if i really 
needed to... but see end of paragraph that begins 'first').  i do know how to 
compile from source, but if something is already built for me for my system, 
i would prefer to use that and take advantage of that resource.

freebsd gives you options.  latest php4 and mysql4?  latest apache 1.3?  your 
not even ready to move from freebsd 4.x to 5.x?  no problem.

and that's, what i think.

cheers,
jonathan