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In my experience, FreeBSD's greatest asset doesn't fit well on a feature list. It's that it has a different attitude towards change than Linux. Linux is a diverse ecosystem, with tons of experiments driving it forward. Different package managers, different kernel patches, different userland configurations, different means of administration... and that's a great thing. FreeBSD is not diverse or experimental. FreeBSD is a deliberately moving beast, that adopts technologies and ideas in a more methodical manner, often after other OS's (OpenBSD / NetBSD / DragonflyBSD / Solaris / Linux / OS X) have proved that the ideas are solid, and lasting, and then it integrates them carefully, so it still looks like FreeBSD (but with some new capabilities, or better performance, or whatever), rather than having drastically different administration mechanisms, or performance characteristics, or anything else. Personally, I like this stability. I like that it's a platform that once learned, can be largely forgotten about. But that said, it does require learning first, and while it's powerful, it's not shiny or sexy. But even excluding the man pages and documentation, zfs, the pf firewall, and many other things I like about FreeBSD, this is the winner for me. I just love that it doesn't change unless the change is a large win. |