Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 507
Stability. Responsiveness under massive load. Support for older/non-Intel hardware.
On the flipside, if you want a much larger userbase (and correspondingly, greater web and usenet support) Linux is where it's at. Linux is large, and messy, and anarchic, whereas BSD (FreeBSD, anyway, which is the most mainstream of the BSDs) tends much more towards stability and 'correctness', sometimes to the point of near-absurdity. If you're an ISP, for example, and want a system that will laugh at massive loads, and barring hardware fatalities, never crash, then get thee a copy of BSD. You'll love it, at least if you're prepared to deal with a little less user-friendliness than you're used to.
Personally, I used to run Free on my toy server (c3po.futureconsortium.com) but switched to Debian after witnessing the power of apt. Now, I run Debian on Intel/AMD servers, Mandrake or SuSE or Fedora on desktops, and BSD on Alphas or older hardware.
The BSD VM system is a work of art, for example (read this for details), and I've seen this born out in practice. Of course, Linux is still very impressive, especially on very large systems.
On the flipside, if you want a much larger userbase (and correspondingly, greater web and usenet support) Linux is where it's at. Linux is large, and messy, and anarchic, whereas BSD (FreeBSD, anyway, which is the most mainstream of the BSDs) tends much more towards stability and 'correctness', sometimes to the point of near-absurdity. If you're an ISP, for example, and want a system that will laugh at massive loads, and barring hardware fatalities, never crash, then get thee a copy of BSD. You'll love it, at least if you're prepared to deal with a little less user-friendliness than you're used to.
Personally, I used to run Free on my toy server (c3po.futureconsortium.com) but switched to Debian after witnessing the power of apt. Now, I run Debian on Intel/AMD servers, Mandrake or SuSE or Fedora on desktops, and BSD on Alphas or older hardware.
The BSD VM system is a work of art, for example (read this for details), and I've seen this born out in practice. Of course, Linux is still very impressive, especially on very large systems.
