What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Joao Barros]

On 10/15/06, Joao Barros <joao.barros at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 ;-)

Ok, make that 3: Ports
I really don't miss rpm hell.

-- 
Joao Barros