Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 00:56:06 -0700 (PDT) From: bitter@noah.org To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Need comparative data Message-ID: <67650953.933580567520.JavaMail.nobody@shell5.ba.best.com>
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I've been browsing through the mail archives look for the "Linux Versus FreeBSD" type messages. They all seem to go something like this: Newbie Q:"What's the difference between Linux and FreeBSD?" Guru A:"It all depends on what you want and even if I knew the answer I would not tell you because I refuse to lower myself by getting involved in a religious OS war." I'm coming from a large company that uses mostly Sun Solaris and a bit of WinNT. A group of us is trying to put together a low cost system to run a load balanced web server (currently 4 Ultra2 running Netscape Enterprise server) with some server side database application code. We're a bit tired of Sun and we are fed up with Netscape. We are currently evaluating Linux versus FreeBSD (originally we were considering WinNT, but we have a lot of legacy scripts that make the web server work. Also I was the only WinNT advocate and when it was suggested that my penis might not be big enough I finally relented and decided to stick with a UNIX variant. But which one?) As far as administration and support goes I think it's clear that Linux has a big advantage. Many packages (like Apache and Squid) come prebuilt in RPM format. Also Linux seems to have good Java support. As far as performance and reliability go I have not seen any arguments one way or another. I suspect that FreeBSD is more stable (another reason we decided against WinNT). Also, it seems that FreeBSD might be more modular. We would like to remove as much crap as possible to get a clean and easy to maintain system. But I don't have any real reason to believe that Linux isn't dependable compared to WinNT. We could also stick with Solaris since the Intel Solaris licenses are not very expensive. Solaris is pretty good as far as I can tell, but I'm not real fond of the Sun techs. One thing I keep reading is that "Linux and FreeBSD are really more alike than they are different." If that is true than can someone give me one reason why I should use FreeBSD? If all the support and momentum is with Linux then why risk going with FreeBSD? "Throw me a bone here people..." Yours, Noah bitter@noah.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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