I love FreeBSD. Some time ago I switched from linux to freebsd on my servers. This was partially influenced by friends and by some ISP's who use freebsd and partly because of my frustrations with Linux. Linux suffered from the fact that it is fragmented among distributions (freebsd is freebsd, let's keep open/net/dragonfly/pc/desktop bsd out of the equation...), network performance of linux was not as good as freebsd and development cycle was messy. I was using debian linux at that time, and had lots of troubles maneuvering between stable, which was outdated, unstable, which was... unstable.. and testing, which was still unstable. FreeBSD had the right balance between stable and cutting edge. The port system was very handy to make custom compiled software, like postfix with mysql support etc. Recently I tried using linux (centos, ubuntu, debian) again and I was quite impressed with the developments. Debian/ubuntu especially have a really elegant handling of the configuration of services, especially for things like apache. I really love apt-get, I think it is the superior package manager. Then came FreeBSD 7, which tackled a lot of the performance problems, that made freebsd underperform on multiple processor machines, compared to linux. So now I am hesitating if I should not switch back. On one hand, I am used to freebsd, I like the cleanliness of it, the elegance, the neatness of confguration, but I do not like the awkward way of doing portupgrades, and the bad java support (this may actually not be a problem anymore). On the other hand ubuntu server, with the elegant configuration management of apache, the superior package management, better hardware support (including IPMI and motherboard probes) makes it also very compelling.

Tags: freebsd,unix,sysadmin