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Use the right tool for the job. I wouldn't choose Windows XP to run an important server just because it has the most marketshare in the world. Granted, I don't know the differences between the *BSDs, but there must have been some small presiding factor there.

I think I figured it out:

"Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers"

Exotic hardware.

FreeBSD isnt so great on hardware that doesn't fall into these catagories:

alpha, amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, sparc64.

But I thought it was cool to learn that FBSD 6.2 now supports Macs and the Xbox 1.

FreeBSD doesn't work well on Alphas, support is depreciated, PPC and Sparc64 support are also lacking. FreeBSD is the i386, and to a lesser extent amd64 BSD, they only care about the "major" hardware platform. An Xbox is just an i386 box, like any other.

NetBSD and to a lesser extend OpenBSD are the more unusual hardware supporters.

PC98 support is good and PPC support is better now. Sparc64 is a Tier 1 platform but lagging a little.

Bottom line is FreeBSD works on the majority of systems on the market:

All the systems in my house are i386, for example.

Compared to other BSD solutions, FreeBSD has clear advantages on the systems it does support:

FreeBSD has the more ported software, drivers, far better 3D graphics support, Wine, and commercial support (Win4BSD, SoftMaker Office, etc).

Lagging any more and the sparc64 port would be tier 2 right along side Alpha. The majority is i386, but not in any embedded market it's not, the Xscale/ARM stuff is king there.

I'd disagree with you on the more drivers bit there, I'd say different is a better word. Considering OpenBSD does support more of my machines better than FreeBSD does, and admittedly, all I have are i386 machines at home, though I have my eye on this one arm pda I've seen for sale. Perhaps I just use too much wireless stuff.

I also bring up the point of the terrible quality of the FreeBSD ports system, by supporting three seperate version of FreeBSD instead of just the release that it's on, FreeBSD significantly decreases the rate at which a port works on any of them. It also has so many unmaintained packages that it becomes problematic.

Yes, FreeBSD does have very, very limited 3d support, it's mostly through running Linux binaries - something that I dare say OpenBSD finds offensive from a security front and would never support, even if a company made native binaries.

I agree, FreeBSD has greater commercial support, an even lighter lip service than that which is given to Linux, but it is there. Unfortunately, many commercial programmes are old and made for the 4.x series of FreeBSD, not 7.

Regardless, the existances of ports, 3d suport, wine, commerical binaries, none of those matter for an embedded operating system, platforms supported most definately does, and there NetBSD wins.

Edited 2007-02-23 21:16

As someone who actually runs FreeBSD on both sparc64 and alpha, I can assure you that sparc64 is in a *much* better state than alpha, which has been removed from -CURRENT (sadly). The sparc64 port is not in as good shape as the i386 port, of course, it's true, but this is true for pretty much all operating systems other than Solaris. In addition, FreeBSD 7 now contains a port to ARM.

FreeBSD's ports system actually works quite well, and on a variety of releases. I've never had any major problem with it, and maintain 30 FreeBSD machines on five architectures running releases 4.6 through 7-CURRENT.

This reliability is largely due to the build system of the software itself -- it probably is coded to support all releases of FreeBSD, as well as linux, Solaris, and what have you. It's fairly rare that anything in particular needs to be done by the packager to support a different OS release. This, in fact, is one of the port system's greatest strengths -- you can get current software on any release you like on any architecture without waiting for someone to build packages for your specific system.

FreeBSD's 3D support is not related at all to the linuxolator, either. It uses the standard X.org DRI drivers on supported hardware, and an nVidia driver supplied by nVidia on their hardware. This is one of 3 X11 drivers they provide -- for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD -- and is hardly related to Linux binary compatibility.

As for commercial software, some is made for FreeBSD 4.x, but I would remind you that as recently as a year and a half ago, 4.11 was still the official stable release. 7 is something that exists today only as a CVS tag, and 5 and 6 are essentially the same from a software vendor's point of view. I would remind you that a lot of commercial Linux software is listed as requiring some ancient release of Red Hat.

NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux all have their uses and places, but you should certainly be less misleading and deliberately inflamatory.

Edited 2007-02-24 05:00

Speaking of deliberately inflamatory: "The FreeBSD SMP implementation (SMPng) is younger because it was rewritten not to be terrible."

Perhaps you see strengths where I see obvious weaknesses, I am seeing things from a different angle, from the vantage point of someone who tried and didn't like FreeBSD.

The ports tree's multi-release support leads to a great deal of instability, flaws are introduced regularly to ports because they are not tested on multiple releases and instead there must be the constant drive to fix flaws that should not have been introduced. Instead of having a stable tree, there is one in constant flux, a terrible thing for me, but you seem to be jizzing on it for the very reason I dislike it. Perhaps I got hit with it's problems too many times, and you consider it worth the pain to get more recent software on older releases. Hell, if I want recent software, I run a recent operating system.

If something only exists for an ungodly old release of Red Hat, then it's not really support for the system is it? If the commercial stuff only exists for a release from multiple years ago, it's no longer supported in my mind at least. I mean, I don't consider something released for Windows 2000 only to be supporting Windows, cause Windows is on the Vista release now.

NetBSD runs on several different and very "exotic" hardware architectures; FreeBSD runs in the most common architectures.

Also the FreeBSD SMP implementation is younger than the NetBSD impl; if you can several critical SMP servers, I think you should choose NetBSD over FreeBSD.

The FreeBSD SMP implementation (SMPng) is younger because it was rewritten not to be terrible. NetBSD's only runs the kernel on one CPU, for instance, preventing concurrency in kernel tasks. FreeBSD's current SMP implementation is much, much more scalable than anything in any other BSD, and anyone who wants to run a performance-critical SMP server and wants to use BSD would be mad not to use it.

Maybe he should think on using DragonFly!!!!

Just for grins, why did FORCE10 choose NetBSD when FreeBSD has over 80% of the BSD marketshare?

Further, I guess they didn't choose Linux because they wanted to make it proprietary.

Edited 2007-02-23 01:22

Sadly, you're completely right.

"Further, I guess they didn't choose Linux because they wanted to make it proprietary. "

Because we all know that as soon as someone picks anything over Linux it's because they want to make it proprietary and nothing else.
Hogwash.

It's probably true, though. I don't think proprietary is an evil word, though. Take the core which is open (hopefully fix the bugs and improve on it) and build your own stuff on top of it.

There was some facetiousness intended there...

Vendors are choosing Linux these days simply because it's very marketable. When a vendor chooses a BSD, it's almost always because of a real technical advantage (such as the outstanding pf packet filter) or the more permissive license. Nonetheless, if their business model was to sell network gear that uses proprietary kernel extensions, then Linux is a non-starter right off the bat.

"Nonetheless, if their business model was to sell network gear that uses proprietary kernel extensions, then Linux is a non-starter right off the bat."

Not really. ImageStream (http://www.imagestream.com/) is using Linux with their own proprietary (IIRC) drivers.

I checked their site and confirmed that they use GPL kernel drivers.

Actually my first thought, since it's related to switches/routers was that they didn't choose Linux due to iptables sucking.

It's certainly no pf, you got that right! Hey, I'm a Linux guy, but I admit where we're soundly beaten.

Amen. - free as in freedom (the so-called freedom according to RMS and his fellowers) - take it, in real freedom (not a parody of it) every can have a different opinion too and only time will tell which one was the "best".
Tell some news about other *free* choices et voila some Linux/GPL zealots will pop up and poison the atmosphere. Please god, we don't want some free software communism, just real freedom and open-source.

Don't open that can of worms.. It will only result in a flamewar

Edited 2007-02-23 18:58

"it is a great os, and it's able to run on over 50 different platforms as a whole os, something that many more popular OS can not do, and it's very,very portable. "

And it runs on my toaster, too. :-)

You may want to check out the NetBSD Live 2007 live system CD to have a look at it. It features an SMP kernel as well. And KDE. The german internationalisation is quite good because it's not limited to KDE.

What ? The orange flag just suck.
I much prefer puffy and beasty.

The reason I'm saying this is, I don't understand how people find an icon of the devil amusing. However I do understand it's wildly popular in many corners of the internet. This is probably the reason why governments such as the USA simply hires actors, to interface with the crowds, while the real decisions goes on behind the scenes. They see a country where, having the devil as a logo in a software, by people intelligent enough to program such a thing, find this acceptable. Ofcourse, one learns, and finds a solution.

Edited 2007-02-23 21:56

...

If you're ever interested in writing for BeDoper, I'd say you're eminently qualified.

No.

Aw, please? That "BSD and the devil" rant was great. If you can write something equally insane - say, every a week or so - then you've got a real future as an internet humourist.

No Be, No Dope. No Tikalovers either.

And here I thought North American hipsters were tiresome.

I don't understand how people find an icon of the devil amusing

Perhaps because everyone doesn't take religions seriously or is not a fundamentalist ...

Yeah the new FreeBSD logo is hot.

Though I like this NetBSD one:

http://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg

Its almost reminicent of 9/11.