Re:Any reason to switch? (Score 1)

Hi there. Yeah, Gentoo is probably the most flexiable and comprehensive distro of them all. Portage is like ports, but with caching and indexing in a database instead of using flat files layed out in a tree like pkgsrc and ports. If you are married to commercial/proprietary applications, you're stuck for now. Java is now native, and I've ran Acrobat Reader 7 and Realplayer 10 fine under FreeBSD with it's Linux compatibility layer. Most things will run, of course VMware and Flash are the most notible products that do not support *BSD. My reasons for atleast giving it a try each few releases is: Stability, it is very reliable based on production ready code dating back to AT&T's original UNIX operating system. It is a complete operating system, everything, including the SSL libraries, kernel sources, and userland applications are audited and modified by the BSD core team, who have strict rules on what gets in. It is secure, the code is not as chaotic, and many of the committers work for big companies, are responsible, and knowledgable. BSD is chiefly used in science and high-performance computing environments, so it is scalable, and is portable on a handful of architectures. I have used FreeBSD on i386, AMD64, PowerPC, and SPARC64. The main thing I like is consistancy, you don't have to relearn stuff twice generally. The installation routines indicated by my Walnuat Creek FreeBSD 4.1 for the most part still work, even after all of those releases. There are other reasons, but a big one is the ports system. There are about 10,000 ports available. Essentially all open-source software written in a POSIX/ANSI compatible manner will work on *BSD. There are also a lot of commercial titles in the ports system, which can be installed by passing options to the make command. You could compare this to unmasking if you liked. I've used FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Gentoo myself, as well as many other systems, distros, etcetera. I really like how the FreeBSD releases are solid and work with the majority of my daily problems by being able to handle the demands of my business. As I said on BSDtalk #43 when I was interviewed by Will Backman, BSD to me is just better, but I really need Flash, no matter how little such a thing may be. Hopefully if people actually get up, download a copy, install it, read some documentation from the site and from some of the great O'Reilly books, and understand it, then we'll have more BSD users. I really don't like the rivally between the systems, and I really emphisize that writing cross-compatible code is important. I can use GNOME, KDE, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, Firefox with Java (Native now, thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation), and thousands of other common titles if I like, just by using packages available from 20 or so FTP mirrors, or via ports if I want to build extra features like Gentoo USE flags. Gentoo is currently having problems with chaotic release structuring and proposal acceptance, I heard. Maybe they can borrow another idea, not just ports from the BSD projects, that being the control over releases to assure quality and consistancy.