FreeBSD vs Linux – One Geeks Opinion.
To a lot of people the choice of which Linux distribution is as religious as the emacs vs vi argument. Debian vs RedHat vs Suse etc. etc. etc. At least a handful of us jump ship completely and prefer to run systems from the BSD camp. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD round out the big four, with pile of smaller versions in the wings as well. I happen to fall into this camp. I am a FreeBSD user.
Lets start with a little history. The Linux kernel was released in it’s first version in 1991. It was a new creation, based loosely off of the Minix, written by a Finnish College student named Linux Torvalds. FreeBSD traces it’s roots back to Berkley Unix which did not run originally on i386 hardware. There was a project that died in 1989 called 386BSD that was working to port Berkley Unix to the i386 processor however. That project was revived in 1993. There was a lawsuit in the ’90s that lead to some number of lines of code being removed from the FreeBSD Kernel, and FreeBSD can not be called Unix. The rest of the terms of the settlement are largely unknown as the file was sealed and has not been opened.
FreeBSD uses a package management system called Ports. Ports streamlines the process of compiling packages, and simplifies the management of those packages dependancies. Now on the Linux side there are a number of different ways to manage packages on the system. On Debian you have apt, RedHat gives you yum, Arch Linux uses pacman, and Gentoo uses portage, which is roughly an implementation of the FreeBSD Ports system.
One of the things I like most about the FreeBSD operating system is you know what you’re getting right out of the box. It is a complete operating system. An engineering goal is laid out in front of the software engineers, and they work to meet that goal. It’s been said that one of Linux’s greatest advantages is that the developers are working on a thousand improvements all at the same time. Linux will do things in a year FreeBSD will never do, or if it does it may be some time before those features are added. However when FreeBSD implements that feature it will be perfectly integrated with the entire system. A quote I read, and I apologize for not being able to cite my source, says “FreeBSD is what you get when software engineers set out to port a Unix operating system to the PC. Linux is what you get when software engineers set out to write a Unix operating system for the PC.” That really sums it up in a nutshell doesn’t it.
