Linked by We don't know anymore on Mon 28th Jan 2002 18:52 UTC
The BSD family of operating systems date all the way back to the 1980s when AT&T owned the legal rights to the OS known generically as "Unix". During that time, the source code was licensed out to a few communities, each of which developed their own proprietary version. One of the versions was BSD-Unix, named after the University of Berkeley. Due to license agreements with AT&T when Berkley tried to release their BSD-Unix for free, AT&T sued. The outcome of that lawsuit was the creation of BSD/OS, which was basically AT&T/BSD Unix with the proprietary AT&T code removed. Later on the commercial BSD was branched into what is today FreeBSD. FreeBSD currently runs on the Intel and Alpha architectures, with ports to Arm, Itanium, PowerPC and Sparc on the works.
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I tried Linux and hated it and ran back to FreeBSD.
Linux installations blow crud all over your disk with no organization, and you never know where anything is. FreeBSD is nice and neat and everything is organized. During an install you know exactly what you are getting, instead of just getting a dump of 6000 packages I'll never use, like most Linux Distros install.
In FreeBSD it's easy to know what tools to use to administer your system: /stand/sysinstall and emacs (or your favorite editor) manage everything. In Linux, there seem to be 10 different management tools for every feature. Talk about confusing.
FreeBSD also behaves simply at startup. You stick stuff in /usr/local/etc/rc.d, or you edit /etc/rc.conf, and stuff runs. Simple. I never could figure out the silly Linux startup stuff.
The ports tree just rules. Who hasn't downloaded an RPM, gone rpm -U some.rpm, and gotten about 20 failed dependencies? Package management in Linux is just ridiculous. Give me "cd /usr/ports/editors/emacs21 && make install" any day!
Plus, if you don't run release candidates (betas) or the CURRENT version of FreeBSD, and stick to STABLE or RELEASEs, it NEVER crashes. Ever. Linux stuff is always beta.
My two bits. Feel free to flame.