Choosing BSD over Ubuntu?
June 8, 2007 – 2:27 pmDue to the great media exposure, many are buzzing about Ubuntu and many are writing articles about the migration to Ubuntu, including us.
But after spending some time researching various flavors of BSD (I’m not considering Solaris, because I want to stick to the cheaper Intel hardware, since one of my goals is creating a low financial cost of entry) I’m seeing some serious arguments for choosing a BSD flavor over Ubuntu (Three that stand out is smaller footprint, stability and security).
My overall goal is to create a platform for entrepreneurs (the details can be found here). The goals/results that I am looking for are located here.
What is your take? BSD or Ubuntu? Why?
2 Responses to “Choosing BSD over Ubuntu?”
Linux every time. I’ve had too many bad experiences with *BSD for it to be all my fault. I’m sure I’m not blameless and I have nothing against the little red guy himself, but it’s just never played nicely. Part of this might be the environment - one time a badly configured cPanel FreeBSD, another had FreeBSD for Sparc running on an old Sun box which meant I couldn’t install all the stuff I needed to, but I’m sure there’s a load of old BSD coders out there intent on making the user experience a nightmare, just for me.
By Mike Nolan on Jun 8, 2007
It depends the environment you are talking about. As far as desktop, I take Linux since you have projects like Ubuntu emphasizing mainly on that (i.e. updates, etc.) For running a server BSD is really attractive but if you already have Linux on the desktop and you developing web applications on it, might as well keep everything the same since it will be easier to create a sandbox that performs and acts similarly as the server.
As Mike mentioned, the experiences you have to get everything running smoothly on BSD sometimes can be annoying. I also run Linux because there is greater compatibility and support for applications and hardware. There are many applications that are being developed in Linux then ported to FreeBSD and Solaris therefore the lack of support for these OSes. Linux has also come a long way on performance and now performs extremely good.
BTW, you can run Solaris on Intel hardware. I ran Solaris on all my NFS servers and they performed really good. Linux didn’t perform as good (in 2000-2003) with NFS.
Another thing to consider is if you’re developing applications at the kernel level, you may consider BSD since their license is more flexible for proprietary applications as opposed to the GPL where you have to make your source available.
If Linux is getting the job done in performance and security, I dont see a reason to migrate to BSD.
By isaldana on Jun 8, 2007