Mike <Ama### [at] aolcom> wrote:
> I've been thinking of installing a Unix OS on an extra computer I have.
> The obvious choice seems to be Linux, but I recently heard about this
> FreeBSD.

> Anyone know how it compares to Linux and is it worth getting?

I have used both OS's extensively. I would not use anything other than
FreeBSD for any 'serious' Unix work (in my case this means putting a system
on the net).

For example, this very newsserver is running under FreeBSD. As is the povray
and irtc webservers. Additionally, ftp.cdrom.com - the worlds busiest FTP
server - runs FreeBSD (4gb RAM, 200gb or so of disk, 10,000 users. It does
about 750 gigabytes of transfers per day). Guess what OS Microsoft uses
for Hotmail's web servers ? NT, you may think. Nope. FreeBSD. Yahoo - the
web's busiest portal site - also used FreeBSD. The list goes on.

I've got nothing against Linux - in fact, I quite like it, and for home use
(such as what you're doing) it's quite good. But my personal experience
has shown that the FreeBSD environment is more stable and more coherent
(this is helped by the central development model). It's also much easier to
keep up to date - almost automatic, for that matter. And the ports collection
is much nicer than using individual RPM's or equivalent.

One other point - FreeBSD is quite capable of running almost all Linux
binaries. In some cases it even runs them faster than Linux does ;). I
intend setting up the Linux port of the quake2 server here sometime.

-- Chris Cason
   [povray.org admin]

Post a reply to this message