What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Garrett Cooper]

Jim Stapleton wrote:
>> I have a few FreeBSD machine from 4.x to 5.x. I have asked people how to
>> upgrade them to latest version 6.x cleanly. All I was told is that I
>> need to wipe them out and reinstall. However, this is not the case with
>> Gentoo Linux. With Gentoo, version release does not matter that much,
>> you can always keep your system up to date if you like. Of cause, you
>> can also choose staying at a certain version.
>
> I'm gonna join the "whoever said this was on crack" club. Going
> between major versions can be a challange due to mergebastard and the
> various config file change, but Gentoo's setup is really no different
> in that respect.
>
> However, when you want to compile the Kernel, the FreeBSD system is
> much mroe useful than that of Gentoo. I failed my first kernel build
> on FreeBSD (custom kernel config) before it booted properly, and have
> since done several more without issue.
>
> With Gentoo, after about half a dozen attempts at optimizing my kernel
> for my notebook, I gave up and used Genkernel, which was not as
> efficient, but at least worked.
No offense to those who swear by it (and I know this is a bit 
off-topic), but genkernel is shit. It's kernel compiling for people who 
are afraid of forgetting make commands..
-Garrett
>
>> Linux supports more devices than FreeBSD, especially new devices.
>
> Spend an extra 5 minutes researching your hardware before buying, more
> often than not, this'll save you the issues.
True.