Strange article -- half polemic half unnecessary (anyone who spends 5 minutes reading up on BSD would have heard of ports).<p>For a more detailed take on BSD vis-a-vis Linux: <a href="http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin...</a> . BSD user's point of view, target audience Linux users.
In the first part, they are comparing apples and oranges, and in a very meaningless way. Compare FreeBSD to Debian or Redhat or Suse or Ubuntu or anything, if you want to. What sense does this make? If you were going to use Linux, you would use some distro, so compare FreeBSD to that distro.<p>Performance part doesn't really say anything. It's far too vague and incomplete.<p>And ports could be easily compared to, say, Gentoo system, or something similar. Just describing them doesn't make much sense, given that you are targeting mostly current FreeBSD users. I wouldn't even rule out a possibility that there is some Linux system using NetBSD pkgsrc, as it should be quite portable (and comparable to the ports).<p>In summary, the article is quite bad :-)
As an avid FreeBSD user, I must say that the article didn't really provide an unbiased comparison of Linux to FreeBSD. It didn't offer any of the advantages Linux may have over BSD.<p>Linux has an amazing community with better application support. Linux also has an optimized C library. For example, you should take a look at BSD's strlen() versus GNU's strlen().