What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Garrett Cooper]

Jim Stapleton wrote:
>> Also, I'm not sure when you guys tried Gentoo, but as of late (within
>> the past ~1 year), the quality of the packages and system as an OS has
>> improved quite a bit, in the sense that many stable items now install
>> and work properly in the OS. Another off-topic comment I admit, but I
>> thought it should be mentioned...
>
> I've been trying to deal with it for the past two months, on and off.
> OpenOffice would not compile, Xorg took a lot of tweaking and a few
> attempts, and a few other programs provided a bit of challange. Only
> KDE went more smoothly than it did in FBSD.
Hmmm... maybe it's just my playing around with Linux in general before I 
started using FreeBSD on my servers, but it didn't really seem like that 
much of a challenge for me. Then again, each user's experience differs, 
and maybe that's the best gem of advice I can give the original poster 
of this message when he asked us to 'wow' him.
>> I'd like to see portage in FBSD though, since ruby is pretty kludgy.
>> Either that or a different means of recording package data and
>> dependencies (been thinking of Perl for a while..).
>
> Where does Ruby fit into this? To my knowledge, ports uses Perl to my
> knowledge, and Portage uses Python.
>
Read the email I just wrote in reply to Raymond (timestamp should be 
shortly after this email).
> And while I wouldn't mind a few of the portage features, such as about
> 10k more packages, and a few of the interface/display options, I'd
> still rather use FBSD any day.
Not saying I don't feel the same either, but the interface for updating 
ports could be better..
-Garrett