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Old 12th November 2008
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Originally Posted by richardpl View Post
Incorrect. FreeBSD support is better. (Just having few more poor quality drivers doesnt mean better wireless support), OpenBSD just got WPA recently ...., ignoring fact that OpenBSD doesnt support NDIS.
I do not want to get into any kind of flame war I just want to state that
OpenBSD will NEVER get support for NDIS. That is the principal philosophical difference from FreeBSD. If you subscribe to such kind of puritan OpenBSD philosophy that might be one of the reason not to use FreeBSD.

But on the more serous note, I could probably think of 3-5 reasons not to use FreeBSD on the desktop or server.

Common "problems" for FreeBSD desktop are:
1. Lacks drivers for cheap USB cameras so VoIP with video is not possible

2. Lacks drivers for Scanners. Even the one supported by sane-backends often do not work on FreeBSD as developers are lazy to list their vendor IDs explicitly on uscanner driver without which they can not work.
On the another hand you can always recompile your kernel with support for your scanner.

3. Lets talk more about printer and scanners. There are lots of proprietary drivers for Printers and Scanners written only for Linux. Usually people who are using computers on the desktop just want those kinds of things to work not to do treasure hunting for supported devices. This is in particularly true for scanners. Things like HPLIP do not work well on FreeBSD. They are coded for Linux. On FreeBSD your YMMV with HPLIP.

4. So what did you say about Gnash and YouTube? You are kidding right?
Gnash doesn't support Flash 9. So yes Flash is really problematic on FreeBSD.
Saying different is fooling yourself.

5. If you need video tuner card FreeBSD is not a good choice for you unless you want to hunt on ebay for
specific video tuner card with bktr chip-set.

OK I will stop this cra***. I said only 5 reasons why one want to rethink
running FreeBSD on the desktop.

Now why wouldn't you want it on the server? Hmmm This one is more difficult.

1. If you want the latest PF FreeBSD is not for you.
2. If you want Xen then FreeBSD is not for you.
3. If your server is not i386 or in the worst case scenario amd64 I would
think twice before running FreeBSD on it.
4. You have a mother board with 128 i386 processors and 256GB of RAM you might be better of with
RedHat Linux.
Enough of this bashing of FreeBSD

Last edited by Oko; 12th November 2008 at 09:30 PM.
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Old 12th November 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by richardpl View Post
Incorrect. FreeBSD support is better. (Just having few more poor quality drivers doesnt mean better wireless support), OpenBSD just got WPA recently ...., ignoring fact that OpenBSD doesnt support NDIS.

Irrelevant.

Wrong, Flash can be used via gnash/wine/youtube-dl combination. Almost all multimedia on Web can be viewed via mplayer.

>ignoring fact that OpenBSD doesnt support NDIS.

Ignoring the fact that NDIS in FreeBSD is in a sorry state. You'll get a better wrapper in Linux - so what? You will get even better support in Windows ;-)

>Wrong, Flash can be used via gnash/wine/youtube-dl combination.

Gnash ist PITA like swfdec. Something really useful instead of youtube-dl would be clive. Furthermore Flash 9 is possible (not for videos only) with the help of Linuxulator. There is more than Youtube, Youp0rn and videos ...

>OpenBSD just got WPA recently

Irrelevant, WPA is PITA - consumer grade security. Every respectable company or university has got VPN.

So what? Let's fight? Remember it's BSD! Don't start something like a Linux distro war.
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Old 12th November 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
4. You have a mother board with 128 i386 processors and 256GB of RAM you might be better of with
RedHat Linux.
IMHO Solaris / OpenSolaris will be better here, but I would like to see benchmarks
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Old 12th November 2008
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IMHO Solaris / OpenSolaris will be better here, but I would like to see benchmarks
Solaris can run 128 processors on i386? If that is true it is a very useful information.
For Sparc64 yes.

Last edited by Oko; 12th November 2008 at 10:17 PM.
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Old 12th November 2008
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>Solaris can run 128 processors on i386?

Usually i386 is the ugly stepchild of Solaris
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Old 12th November 2008
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Originally Posted by ninjatux View Post
1. I've used MPlayer Plugin for almost 5 years and never had a single crash.
I really wish I could say the same about the ~2 years that I've been using it on FreeBSD.
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Old 12th November 2008
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How good is FreeBSD as a cluster? Can it work with iSCSI? Say one wants to create a high-availability database cluster with say two nodes (active/passive) using iSCSI? Any reason not to use FreeBSD?

How good is vendor support for FreeBSD on servers (or vice versa)? Say an enterprise buys everything from one of the big ones: Dell, HP, IBM, others. How new (or old) does the hardware have to be for FreeBSD to support things like raid cards, hard drive hot swap, and others?

Another reason I see with FreeBSD in the enterprise is that there are not enough people with knowledge as for Linux. Say someone wants to hire an outside consultant or some in-house person, I think maybe they will have a harder time finding FreeBSD folks than Linux people. From what I have experienced, this issue alone can drive a lot of decisions against FreeBSD.

I am trying to gather as many reasons as possible so that a better picture comes up of where FreeBSD is lagging behind comparable solutions. So far all input is appreciated.
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Old 13th November 2008
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Originally Posted by ichbindev View Post
How good is FreeBSD as a cluster? Can it work with iSCSI? Say one wants to create a high-availability database cluster with say two nodes (active/passive) using iSCSI? Any reason not to use FreeBSD?

How good is vendor support for FreeBSD on servers (or vice versa)? Say an enterprise buys everything from one of the big ones: Dell, HP, IBM, others. How new (or old) does the hardware have to be for FreeBSD to support things like raid cards, hard drive hot swap, and others?

Another reason I see with FreeBSD in the enterprise is that there are not enough people with knowledge as for Linux. Say someone wants to hire an outside consultant or some in-house person, I think maybe they will have a harder time finding FreeBSD folks than Linux people. From what I have experienced, this issue alone can drive a lot of decisions against FreeBSD.

I am trying to gather as many reasons as possible so that a better picture comes up of where FreeBSD is lagging behind comparable solutions. So far all input is appreciated.
I do not think that sending a message to a mailing list like this will help you get proper answers to above questions but I will give you my 2c.

I a mathematician so I am not the one whom you want to ask most of above questions anyway. I have been around for a while (read I am old)
so I have seen the stuff.

I think that the answer for first questions is YES. In particular DragonFly
BSD claim to fame is clustering.

FreeBSD has worse support on servers than Linux as it is not usually advertised as vendor supported platform but the support is never the less excellent. BSD license are much more liberal and business friendly than GPL. That should be definitely one thing you want to have in mind.
Various BSDs are usually foundation for high end proprietary solutions.
Many vendors see BSD as a real competition to their proprietary products while they see Linux as something that their customers want.

Please, contact for instance IX Systems and they will hook you up with
FreeBSD server in no time.

Obviously if you are buying high end HP and IBM hardware for couple million dollars they will probably toss you AIX or HP Unix for free.
I would always think twice before running FreeBSD on any IBM PPC hardware or HP itanium processors.

Wintel hardware is different story including RAID. FreeBSD any time any place with FreeBSD.

If you want to run SUN sparc hardware you probably want to use Solaris or if you want DNS, Firewall or similar probably OpenBSD. OpenBSD has the best support for sparc platform of any BSDs with exception of multithreading where Solaris has many advantages over OpenBSD.


I think that people are the greatest FreeBSD asset. In my experience an average FreeBSD power user is real Unix guru with serious academic back ground and many years of experience on proprietary Unix-es. Why is harder to come by such people? You need to pay them more They might be running your local data center IBMs on AIX. They might be running some high end SGI hardware. How many real Linux experts are there? Not that many if you ask me. They are usually former classmates of FreeBSD gurus.
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Old 13th November 2008
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>Many vendors see BSD as a real competition to their proprietary products while they see Linux as something that their customers want.

Yes this I call a definition
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