If one is in doubt of FreeBSD then I don't think this is the most compelling article on the topic. However I do strongly recommend FreeBSD to anyone curious as to what an "alternative Linux" (for want a better description) might look like. By this I mean FreeBSD is one one of the most accessible UNIXes out there (ignoring Darwin for a moment) and it supports a fair amount of GNU-isms that long time Linux users would have become accustomed too.<p>For me, native ZFS support is FreeBSD's killer feature. It's had containerisation (called "jails") long before Linux knew it was a thing and combining those jails with ZFS gave you several of convenience features that VMs and/or Docker offered but 10+ years ago before Docker was a thing. And yes, I know some Linux distributions support ZFS in an official capacity but having used them and FreeBSD, ZFS support on FreeBSD is easily light years ahead of Linux. It's hard to substantiate why other than saying all of those minor niggles you have with Linux+ZFS simply doesn't exist with FreeBSD+ZFS. On FreeBSD, using ZFS feels as native as using the ext4 on Linux.<p>It's a great shame that the industry has monopolised on Linux because FreeBSD brought, and continues to bring, a lot to the table.
<i>{Free/Net/Open}BSD DOCUMENTATION</i> Rocks!<p>Not just the online documentation, but there are really good offline (books) documenting the BSD stack.<p>Back in 1998 I chosed BSD (openBSD) for my thesis just because there was _a lot_ of <i>reliable</i> information about internals, how to develop, etc.<p>For Linux the documentation wasn't as good, and had to search too much online for internals, also and it was a moving target and I was afraid of working on top of something that might change while I was working on my project.<p>Now you can get a lot of information about linux just googling; but if you're offline you can get great *BSD documentation.
More in depth list of unique FreeBSD features:
<a href="https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/" rel="nofollow">https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/</a>
For me, the major strength of (Free)BSD is that it's so well organized at every level. The project, the documentation, the OS. A coherent whole with the right amount of conservatism. No change for the sake of change, while actual progress is made in very a gradual fashion. Never do I worry whether an update will break by system, or render previously gained knowledge useless. In each and every way, it is exactly what I want from a server OS.<p>Unfortunately, getting much less attention than Linux has implications for funding. We're almost half way through the year and haven't reached 10% of the not overly ambitious annual target: <a href="https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/" rel="nofollow">https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/</a>.
One of the things I like about FreeBSD is it has better rusage accounting than Linux. For example, FreeBSD and NetBSD actually fill in the following fields when you call wait4() on a process.<p><pre><code> int64_t ru_ixrss; /* shared memory size (integral kb CLK_TCK) */
int64_t ru_idrss; /* unshared data size (integral kb CLK_TCK) */
int64_t ru_isrss; /* unshared stack size (integral kb CLK_TCK) */
int64_t ru_inblock; /* block input operations */
int64_t ru_oublock; /* block output operations */
int64_t ru_nsignals; /* signals received */
int64_t ru_msgsnd; /* IPC messages sent */
int64_t ru_msgrcv; /* IPC messages received */
</code></pre>
Linux doesn't give you that information. Since FreeBSD does, it's easier to do something like write a reliable network server that monitors worker behavior.
I appreciate what the authors attempted to do in that article, but in my own personal and deeply subjective opinion what they described are not FreeBSD primary strengths. Many features there are not only common to other BSDs but also to Linuxes. I think that a better approach would be talking about project cohesiveness — which is something that BSDs do better than Linuxes — and jails, which can still do a ton of clever stuff.