Reasons Not to Use FreeBSD

[Oko]

Originally Posted by richardpl

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