Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 11:40:43 -0700 From: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Cc: mosborne <mosborne@cbu.edu> Subject: Re: Need advice/direction picking a distro Message-ID: <200405121140.43045.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> In-Reply-To: <40a22977.1c9.2f0a.14008@cbu.edu> References: <40a22977.1c9.2f0a.14008@cbu.edu>
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On Wednesday 12 May 2004 06:41 am, mosborne wrote: > Hi all, with the start of the summer here I am going to have > a little more time on my hands and was wanting to dig into a > new distro. Up until now I haven't had a lot of time so I > have just been running man9.1 and I was now thinking about > making the jump to Debian or even one of the BSD's. What > I've been looking for on the net and can't seem to find is a > good review of the pros/cons of a linux distro like Debian > vs. say freeBSD/openBSD. They all seem to have a great > informative community and thats what makes the decision > harder. Please try not too be too biased in your reply. ;] Everyone is biased. It's a fact of life. One advantage I have over most reviewers is that I will admit to my bias: I prefer FreeBSD. So here's a quick list of items on why I prefer FreeBSD: * It's a complete unified system. Kernel, libc, and all components reside in the same source tree and are developed by the same people. * Excellent documentation. Man pages for everything. Superb handbooks. Documentation is actively maintained, often by the very people who write the software. * FreeBSD is a real Unix. Really! Not a clone, but direct descendent of BSD UNIX. You can't call it that merely because of trademark issues. * Better hardware support. Really! Recently it seems to me that FreeBSD has surpassed Linux in providing Open Source support for new hardware, though Linux is still ahead in the proprietary binary-only department. SATA support is one example where FreeBSD was first. * Ports. This is what Gentoo Linux copied for portage. You can install binary packages or build form source, your choice. The best of both worlds. Ports is better than portage in many areas, such as dependency checking when uninstalling software. * Stability, robustness, security. FreeBSD is rock solid. Finally, some links to some recent discussions of BSD from a Linux perspective: http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=review-freebsd http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-12/bsd_01.html Cheers, David
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