What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:45:55AM -0700, Simon Gao 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.

You don't have to do a fresh install.  Just follow the upgrade
instructions in the handbook and it will probably work.   But
a clean install might be good.   I think there may be some file
system changes that you won't get without a clean install because
the file systems would be already built so the new version would
use the existing form, but I don't remember if that is between 4.x and 5.x 
or between 5.x and 6.x.

Anyway, the original question wasn't why you don't like FreeBSD,
it was why people do like FreeBSD.

////jerry

> 
> Linux supports more devices than FreeBSD, especially new devices.
> 
> Simon
> 
> 
> 
> Jim Stapleton wrote:
> > Well, in my case:
> >
> > - No matter what method I use to install packages in Linux (Apt-Get,
> > Yum, Deb, RPM, and to a much lesser extent, Emerge, and to a *MUCH*
> > greater extent src tar.gz's), I tend to have a lot more trouble
> > getting installs to finish than with BSD in ports.
> >
> > - The FreeBSD community is much more friendly and helpful than the
> > Linux community, in my experience. Gentoo's is better than other Linux
> > communities, but still not quite up to FreeBSD.
> >
> > - I notice a lot smaller number of "It's 'X' liscence, therefore it
> > has to be good", or "It's open source therefore it has to be good"
> > fanboys in FreeBSD. The users tend to be more of a "It works, so it's
> > good" type. This really makes the commmunity pleasant.
> >
> > - The documentation of FreeBSD is much better in both organization and
> > detail - while good documentation can be found for Linux, FreeBSD just
> > takes a lot less searching.
> >
> > - I've found a lot of breaks in Linux where I couldn't find anything
> > short of a system re-install to fix them without a lot more effort in
> > searching for some obscure piece of documentation. Aside from once
> > when I blew up my kernel build, I didn't have that problem in BSD.
> >
> > - It's less popular than Linux, so it's less commonly known/accounted
> > for, and it makes you just that much safer from hackers.
> >
> >
> >
> > Note: that's not to say it doesn't have it's issues, like every other
> > OS, I could name a few dozen issues I've run into with FreeBSD without
> > much hassle (mostly related to drivers, UI, and parts of the
> > installer), but that's a different topic alltogether.
> >
> > -Jim
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