Is FreeBSD a Superior Server Platform to Linux?
By Nathan Boeger
I switched to FreeBSD from Linux last year
not because Linux isn't flexible enough, but because FreeBSD is richer and more mature. There are various flavors of BSD available. FreeBSD has remained consistent on i386 (meaning that it hasn't ported the OS to other platforms, for the most part), and now Alpha architectures. NetBSD has been ported to almost anything with a CPU. OpenBSD also has many ports to different architectures.
However, the main difference lies in its extensive code review. OpenBSD's team reviews all code, looking for possible exploits as well as any other userland exploits. OpenBSD has bragging rights in that it has had "three years without a remote hole in the default install!" This may not seem much of a feat, but compared to other OS default installs that have had serious holes on the system, this is quite impressive.
The reason I've stuck with FreeBSD is that, for the most part, it has very good support for Intel hardware. It lets me use many different types of hardware like RAID controllers and network cards. And FreeBSD also has good support for low level system calls, and a very large port tree.
I've also found that almost any program that runs on Linux will have a FreeBSD port available. If not, FreeBSD's Linux compat support lets me run many Linux programs almost natively.
