You are exactly right. There are good linux distros out there. I have
used several of them. Some are great desktop OS's. Some are good for the
small footprint. Some are great for making bootable CD's to run
antivirus/data recovery apps, and some are great for making
roll-your-own routers and firewalls. Some are good for playing games,
and some are good for emulating Windows apps. Some are easy to install,
and some are not. Some are easy to install with a GUI, and some are not.
Some are well documented, and some are not. Some will run on a 386 with
1M RAM, and some won't run on anything less than a PIII with 256M. There
are as many distros out there as there are opinions as to who has the
best distro. You can order a new server from any Tier1 PC manufacturer
with Linux installed. It has become mainstream.
For a stable, conservative, "always-up" server, I like to run the latest
stable release of Freebsd. I like their version nomenclature, and the
documentation. There are many ports for many server apps ready to run on
FreeBSD. The syntax for the command lines are familiar to me. Its the
same reason that I run Windows on my daily desktop. Its what I am used to.
Pete Davis
NoDial.net.
Ryan Langseth wrote:
Come on you gotta give better reasons than this ;)
Good non-"flavor of the month" distros. Don't lump the whole base into
the same box. Yea there are as many linux distros as there are linux
geeks ;)
Take my favorite distro, debian:
On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 19:17 -0600, Pete Davis wrote:
I think I can answer why I like freebsd.
Stability.
Uptime for months at a time. Most of the problems that I have had with
my Freebsd servers have been when I was doing something stupid that I
now know better.
Ditto
Also, it may be used completely free of charge, even if it is used
commercially. The licensing of linux flavor of the month is not quite so
clear.
ditto
It is used by MANY large commercial web farms, universities, and other
entities.
ditto
It has widespread use enough that if you find a problem with it, the
solution is probably online somewhere.
ditto
In other words, its a more
"mature" operating system than most Linux flavors.
thats just flame bait ;)
Just my $0.02. Not trying to create a flame war.
ditto
Honestly though there are some great reason to use *BSD:
1 Awesome TCP/IP stack, although linux's has gotten better.
2 Ports, up to date software, with very simple commands
3 great firewall(s) ipfw, ipf, and pf (iptables syntax is, bloated at
best compared to ipf and pf, I can't speak for ipfw)
4 Simple kernel in BSD, I _do not_ like the fact that 2.6 is still a
developing kernel ... thats what 2.7 is supposed to be for.
5 Solid, Stable design. No major changes within the core system.
Linux's popularity is also it detriment, not only due to crackers but
due to its own internal developers, code splits, weak code, poor audits
due to the shear number of people working on it. At its core though it
is still secure.
The reason I use debian linux, is because of it package management and
focus on being stable, secure, and free. I understand how to use it and
can work it very well.
I will be looking at using OpenBSD or FreeBSD as my firewall system for
my new server room. PF + Carp, rocks!
Ryan
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