As nearly always when it comes to the choice of an operating system, this choice might be driven by many different kind of “arguments”:

• Personal matter
• Personal experience
• Policies of your Employer
• Policies of your Client
• Available ressources (there is this machine in that datacenter, which is running FBSD and monitored some internal stuff for the last year which we don’t need anymore, but we could run our new Phoenix-Page on it, but we can’t reinstall due to the fact that it is thousands of miles away)

Like the other people have said, unless you have a very specific reason to use FreeBSD I think it’s best to stick to Linux.

I was actually expecting some big arguments against using BSD, but since there seem to be none, I’ll give it a spin
It’s going to be an adventure in uncharted waters for me, but I have high hopes that the buzz will be strong

Please do report back

Why do you want to use FreeBSD @Deithrian? Just curious

@AstonJ I have emotional scars from trying to remove a video codec under Linux and watching the entire OS disappear in front of my eyes
The bloody thing destroyed itself over a video codec…
I know I should read the deps and bla bla, but come on… that’s like uninstalling QuickTime on Windows and watching the uninstaller delete system32

And so, BSD seems to be the second obvious choice for servers, plus no emotional scars there yet lol
I also saw a couple of talks on BSD and there’s a good amount of reasons for using it too.

What’s the TLDR/benefits on using FeeBSD (over Linux) @Deithrian?

Don’t you use the minimal Linux installs on your server? We use the minimal CentOS 7 image (minimal system with SSH daemon) on our new servers and just install what we need…

BSD is a port of Unix to the PC.
Linux is a unix-like emulator for the PC.

Splitting of hairs for the most part. /etc/rc.d/* vs inittab, jail vs virtualization, no run levels. In the end though csh works like csh on both platforms.

BSD would be just harder to maintain. Desktop builds such as PCBSD are a far cry from the user experience you get with modern linux distros.

FreeBSD was the mainstay of colocated machines back in the 90’s when everyone was running a DikuMUD. RedHat started making headway around 1999 or so.

Building up Centos minimal installs is what I’ve always done for deployed projects too. However the fact that ‘stable’ means things installed via yum and the Centos repo are a year behind gets aggravating. Often having to build things from source.

For development at home I choose Fedora for this very reason.

Thanks @Mandemus, so basically theres no real benefit and it becomes harder to maintain. I was expecting more. I guess perhaps it ‘might’ be a little more secure since it is not used as much?

Haha I hear you, but the upside is a rock solid system I use Chruby for ruby versions and don’t mind the occasional building from source.

BSD is rock solid and secure. Not through obscurity but It’s having a long pedigree. It is as I said an actual port of AT&T’s System V Unix. Linux is merely a unix inspired workalike.

AIX on IBM Power hardware is prevalent in science and business, OsX on the Macintosh is also BSD.

I wanted to install two ubiquitous things last month. lftp and tmux. Both were like 5 minor versions behind. I run into that constantly with Centos. It makes the repo essentially a worthless exercise in frustration.

I get why they do it, stability. Still while I don’t need almost daily updates like with Fedora, but the way things are the Centos repo is always feeling ancient.