FreeBSD or Linux? II

In the last post, I had a quick glance on the difference between the two operating systems. Actually, I didn't do as much of writing and work as I should, but I wanted to start my blog as soon as I can, and I wanted to start it particularly on that day, as it is my birthday :).

If you are looking for a day-day computing work, like office applications, email, web browsing, finance applications, multimedia and gaming, I suggest you use Linux. You can use one of the major distributions like openSuSE, Slackware, Redhat or Debian. Or, you can use a derivative distro like Ubuntu, Fedora or Centos.

Of course you can install FreeBSD as a personal OS, but you'll have to be sure to have all your hardware supported by FreeBSD. You can bump into the wall of “your wifi adapter isn't supported, you will have to stick with the cable for the rest of your computer's life”, and believe me, this happens a lot, it happened to me. You may have a fancy ATI graphics adapter, and you won't be able to get one tenth of it's features, because the open source driver doesn't know how to make it work.

The situation is different with Linux, as it is getting more and more hardware support by the day. This doesn't mean that FBSD has no support for hardware, but, it is not the kind of support you will find with Linux.

That's being said, I should say that I haven't gotten an issue with hardware support on server machines running FreeBSD. What I mean is that Linux is a more suitable to work on a desktop/laptop machine than FreeBSD is, and the opposite is completely true.

After all, choosing FreeBSD for your servers is the right thing to do, you will be having the best experience ever when it comes to configuration and maintenance. 

FreeBSD Or Linux?

So, which one is better?

This question has no definitive answer. It is one of those questions that have open answers and no one can put an end to the debate that will be caused by such questions.

In my openion, I think no one is better than the other, generally speaking of course.

Each has it is own strength and weakness points. I will not go into details like licensing, commercial support or even community contributions. I will shade lights on the usability and functionality of a desktop operating system and a roboust web hosting server.

For the desktop market, Linux wins the competetion, this is due to the numerous hardware support that it makes it able to run almost every hardware, from VGA controllers to wireless network cards. It is really easy to configure a Linux machine to do all the daily computing needs including gaming if you want to.

As for the server environment, FreeBSD wins, hands down. It has decent level of security, very well integrated packaging system.  Managing a FreeBSD server is much more fun and easier than managing Linux server, despite what Linux distribution you are talking about.

More on this topic in upcoming posts, sooner.