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Date:      Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:56:32 -0400
From:      "Jim Stapleton" <stapleton.41@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: What's so compelling about FreeBSD?
Message-ID:  <80f4f2b20610151556l18c5adcci4196ab107b6b9907@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <af8b40ce0610151526h6aba1785mb77eb2a76e69fdfa@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <af8b40ce0610151526h6aba1785mb77eb2a76e69fdfa@mail.gmail.com>

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Well, in my case:

- No matter what method I use to install packages in Linux (Apt-Get,
Yum, Deb, RPM, and to a much lesser extent, Emerge, and to a *MUCH*
greater extent src tar.gz's), I tend to have a lot more trouble
getting installs to finish than with BSD in ports.

- The FreeBSD community is much more friendly and helpful than the
Linux community, in my experience. Gentoo's is better than other Linux
communities, but still not quite up to FreeBSD.

- I notice a lot smaller number of "It's 'X' liscence, therefore it
has to be good", or "It's open source therefore it has to be good"
fanboys in FreeBSD. The users tend to be more of a "It works, so it's
good" type. This really makes the commmunity pleasant.

- The documentation of FreeBSD is much better in both organization and
detail - while good documentation can be found for Linux, FreeBSD just
takes a lot less searching.

- I've found a lot of breaks in Linux where I couldn't find anything
short of a system re-install to fix them without a lot more effort in
searching for some obscure piece of documentation. Aside from once
when I blew up my kernel build, I didn't have that problem in BSD.

- It's less popular than Linux, so it's less commonly known/accounted
for, and it makes you just that much safer from hackers.



Note: that's not to say it doesn't have it's issues, like every other
OS, I could name a few dozen issues I've run into with FreeBSD without
much hassle (mostly related to drivers, UI, and parts of the
installer), but that's a different topic alltogether.

-Jim



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