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FreeBSD: Not Exactly Dead
quantumice writes "It would seem that despite being dead and there only being six of us who use it, FreeBSD has clocked up nearly 2.5 million active sites according to Netcraft. So by my estimates that must mean that I and each of my 5 friends run 416 667 sites. That might explain my high bandwidth usage."
Start your trolling
Netcraft confirms it, bsd.slash is dying.
Does anyone seriously think FreeBSD is dead? Then why was this story posted to "prove" than FreeBSD is alive? I don't see any reason why to try prove to the trolls than the *BSDs are alive. The main thing afterall is that YOU think it is a good operating system - not somebody else.
Next story, please.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
But I have to admit this is funny...
DEAD OPERATING SYSTEM SKETCH Cast:
Mr. Praline: John Cleese
Shop Owner: Michael Palin
A customer enters an operating system shop.
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint. (The owner does not respond.)
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
Mr. Praline: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
Owner: We're closin' for lunch.
Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this operating system what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, *BSD...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Owner: No, no, it's uh,...it's resting.
Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead operating system when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Owner: No no it's not dead, it's, it's restin'! Remarkable OS, *BSD, idn'it, ay? Beautiful kernel!
Mr. Praline: The kernel don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Owner: Nononono, no, no! It's resting!
Mr. Praline: All right then, if it's restin', I'll wake it up! (bashes at the keyboard) 'Ello, Mister *BSD! I've got a lovely fresh kernel update for you if you show...
(owner hits the keys)
Owner: There, it spewed some debug output to the command line!
Mr. Praline: No, it didn't, that was you hitting the keys!
Owner: I never!!
Mr. Praline: Yes, you did!
Owner: I never, never did anything...
Mr. Praline: (yelling and typing into the console repeatedly) 'ELLO COMMAND PROMPT!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock cron job!
(Rips out hard drive from computer case and thumps it on the counter. Shoves it back inside the case and reboots the system - blank screen.)
Mr. Praline: Now that's what I call a dead operating system.
Owner: No, no.....No, it's stunned!
Mr. Praline: STUNNED?!?
Owner: Yeah! You stunned it, just as it was finishing an I/O task! *BSD stuns easily, major.
Mr. Praline: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That operating system is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of responsiveness was due to it bein' in the process of recompiling itself after a particularly comprehensive code update.
Owner: Well, it's...it's, ah...probably pining for some dilettante dabbling.
Mr. Praline: PININ' for some DILETTANTE DABBLING?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that? Look, why did it fall flat on its back the moment I started Emacs?
Owner: *BSD prefers swapping everything out to the hard drive! Remarkable variant, id'nit, squire? Lovely kernel!
Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining the system when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been printing any text at all to the screen was because of all the WORRYING COMPILER WARNINGS encountered while it was being rebuilt.
(pause)
Owner: Well, o'course it was spitting out those warnings! If I hadn't updated the kernel with an unstable development build, you might have had your FTP server compromised [slashdot.org], and VOOM! Bye bye to your business.
Mr. Praline: "Server"?!? Mate, this OS wouldn't "serve" if you put four million volts through it! It's bleedin' demised!
Owner: No no! It's pining!
Mr. Praline: It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This OS is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! [lemis.com] It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir inv
Stupid ass BSD is DEAD jokes.
They
stopped
being
funny
when
BSD
died
pair have been using it all along. They've got well over 100,000 domains running. They're but one company.
Oh yeah - Apple's another...
does this mean that domain hijackers/squatters use openbsd? They sure could use the security anyways..
what a pointless story!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
is to be able to moderate an entire story as a troll.
all you are, is all you are, i'm so sorry for you.
Interestingly enough, stories that would seem to be obvious troll fodder don't seem to attract all that much troll interest.
Go figure.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. I
1 machine that runs Mac OSX (a Powerbook)
1 machine that runs Windows 2000 (games machine)
1 machine that runs FreeBSD (workhorse server)
1 machine that runs BeOS 5 (old machine, not seriously used)
I consider all of the above to be "best of breed" operating systems. Linux absolutely blows because of the fragmented userbase. I have a hard time caring about it because of the thousand different distributions all doing things differently.
FreeBSD beats the crap out of Linux for:
* Ease of use - extremely well documented, everything is logically organised
* Reliability - they.. shock.. *test* before they release! (unlike Fedora's GRUB which nuked my drive when I tried it)
* Compatibility - the ports tree is fantastic, plus it runs Linux executables
In short: FreeBSD is great. If you've ever become frustrated with Linux, give it a try. I guarantee you'll love it!
Have you submitted interesting BSD stories and had them rejected?
FreeBSD and BSD/OS are beating any OS. Just visit Sites with longest running systems by average uptime.
Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personae?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. That hope is long gone, replaced by an inconsolable despair. A mournful, plaintive nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
It's a complete OS.
It's not a clone.
Everything runs faster.
It doesn't mess up with your MBR.
It does not come with a particular browser pre-installed.
It's always fun to run FreeBSD.
Quoting the article; The reason for this is FreeBSD's deployment with the operators of shared hosting systems, where tens and even hundreds of thousands of sites are collectively administered as part of a single system.
Yahoo alone hosts something like a quarter million sites.
Perhaps this also explains the low media-profile to some degree ? 10000 companies running 25 sites each are likely to collectively generate a lot more buzz than a single site running a quarter million sites.
FreeBSD died because linux is sooooo superior.
I just heard the sad news on talk radio. *BSD has died.
quantumice writes "It would seem that despite being dead boring and there only being six of us who read it, Netcraft news has clocked up nearly 1 uninteresting story about FreeBSD. So by my estimates that must mean that I and each of my 5 zealot friends must post this dullard nonsense to Slashdot. That might explain my high bandwidth usage."
Not all OSes can have those uptimes. BTW, what you're saying about the uptime thing I guess it was resolved in the Linux kernel 2.6.x series.
I love the way I can build the whole system from source, but I am wanting to try out Linux kernel. Is there a similar Linux system for free? Thanx.
Your nickname contains the word "Coitus". Something you'll never engage in.
From user 5 of 6.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
This is all rather dependant on the accuracy of Netcraft. Although most of the FreeBSD systems I maintain are identified correctly by Netcraft, there are several that always come back as unknown. Netcraft OS detections seems to be reasonable, but not perfect. Their webserver detection is as accurate as it can be, but uptime checks seem to be even less perfect.
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
one of your friends ;-) ..
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
From their FAQ:
;)
Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days.
The *BSDs is very neat, and will probably be my OS of choice on my next computer (selling my mac and either getting a laptop or desktop PC), but lets not get carried away
-Tezkah, user 7 of 7!?
I thought it was funny.
There are only 3 kinds of *BSD users:
- those who have migrated to another OS (former users)
- those who are planning to migrate to another OS (frustrated users)
- hobbyists
When you've done a proper study:
- investigate the use cases and # of use of different OS's in various market segments;
- investigate trends/decline/fall over the past couple of years, etc;
Otherwise, this is all just wanking around based upon individual data points that are interesting in themselves, but are absolutely useless in conveying a broader picture.
Is that you don't have to deal with all that GPL bullshit.
BSD = Capitalism friendly
Nono.. There must be 7 because I use it too and I don't know any of you other 6 guys (or gals if there are any, but then this is slashdot and if even the Linux users can't get any, how on earth are dead FreeBSD users supposed to get any).
home
http://lainos.sourceforge.net/index.php
A new OS inspired by Serial Experiments Lain built ontop of BSD...Interesting
Creative Demolition
That was pretty much the post I had all typed in and hyperlinked, when I managed to crash Netscape 4.7 (don't ask).
I might add one other created on BSD application, the csh.
Yes, this is TOTALLY off topic.. but the one thing that keeps a linux machine around my house is vmware GSX server ( current ) and Crossover Linux ( no, stock wine wont do the trick )
If there was a way to run them under the linux ABI for FBSD, that would be one less linux machine for the stats..
Any one with pointers?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its what is supported at the office, and what we have licenses for. + we use ESX server alongside GSX.
Soooo. not much choice in my case, regardless of the other options.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You know I was wondering why I was awarded mod points. Then I noticed that there was a BSD story posted. Seems like I only get mod points for BSD stories. Trolls...fear me.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
I'm curious about server-level use of NetBSD. As in, is there any of it? We always hear about how so many people use FreeBSD because it's stable as fuck, OpenBSD because it's secure as fuck, Linux because it's trendy as fuck, and Microsoft because the admins (or PHBs) are stupid as fuck, but what sort of use does NetBSD get? It's goal is portability, but how often do you need to source-port your servers? Any Net fanatics out there willing to set me straight?
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
When the fuck do we get FreeBSD 5.3 or NetBSD 2.0?
What's deader than a room full of Ronald Reagan corpses?
ANSWER: *BSD!
This is the dumbest slashdot post I've ever seen. The whole article should be rated -1 Flamebait.
Go into meta-moderation and mod down the people who are modding everything BSD up and everything anti-BSD down.
And please, mod this down. Waste your mod points.
Lunix is dead !
Linux would be a VMS clone.
VDR has not been portet yet, therefore a number of zero pvrs run on bsd yet, therefore it must be dead or at least smelling
Here is the number one reason why Linux sucks:v g.html
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.a
Stability, ladies and gentlemen. Not one single Linux box on the list.
...because it's obscure as f*ck. (Almost as far out there in left field as BeOS, except it *is* a unix). I once bought an old Sparcstation5 that had NetBSD loaded on it and it was about the same as FreeBSD or OpenBSD, just subtle differences. I reformatted the disk after playing around with NetBSD until I was completely bored with it and tried other operating systems: OpenBSD/Sparc, Linux/Sparc and both Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 on the little box (110MHz) and after compiling gcc with gcc itself under each o/s, quickly came to the conclusion that Sun's older Solaris 7 was the snappiest performer on this low-power machine.
If you're gonna run an x86 based piece of hardware, just do yourself a favor and stick with FreeBSD. Not only is it legendary stable, it's also the most refined and snappiest performing *BSD of then all on x86 platform. I just now replaced an old dual PentiumPro 200MHz FreeBSD Compaq Proliant that ran for nearly two years without a reboot, serving a 2GB website with Apache 1.3.x over the internet. Never got hacked either. Funny thing it, it was replaced with a dual 1.4GHz Xeon Proliant running Win2003 with IIS6 (not my choice) and the new box cannot keep up with the workload the old one easily handled. LoL!
It's a bit like that old Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds--only the birds are penguins.
It's only MOSTLY dead!
Reproducing bugs? If it hits FreeBSD-CURRENT, other people can checkout and build whole system, exactly like it was by the date I provide. Try to do the same thing with your Linux OS ;)
Building packages? Yes, that can take a lof of time, except using pkgsrc/Ports I can build any versions I want, and they stay consistent with the rest of the packaging system. Packaging system does everything for me, downloads, checks checksums, applies patches, builds. Even inexperienced user can try this, just by changing version number in Makefile (which is a plain text file, in most cases easy to read and understand). Unless you're using Gentoo, I don't think you can do that that easily with your Linux OS - either you have to do some more complicated tasks, or you end up installing packages by hand - not to mention, that's more time-consuming, than building from Ports/pkgsrc, you end up with having files not maintained by the packaging system.
Have fun! :)
What sort of news is that free*** is not dead and that it has users? Is this some sort of weird self-appreciation exercise?
It's just a trigger to get all free***-zealots to fill up the comments section with their half-assed proofs that free*** is what God gave to Moses (probably on the back of those stone tablets).
Go back into the closet and write your OS a decent journaling filesystem. X-D
When Freebsd developers are sleeping with consoles linux started entering into GUI.
Now with Knoppix live-cd revolution ( Windoze can't even match) linux is reaching end-users. But Freebsd still sitting with consoles and tell the whole world that they have a full-round OS than Linux. Just to compare the growth of Applications with Freebsd applications ! it's amazing!
Are these Freebsd developers anything less than Linux developers ? No. But their focus is still with the console caves! It is nothing wrong in it, if you want to get done your processing! but Freebsd-ers telling all newbies RTFM. It is not newbie friendly. On the otherhand Linux listends to simple users / newbies user and make it easier for them.
It will take another decade for Freebsd-developers to realise that. The real improvement on freebsd websites to count is not how many websites created rather how many individual clients used Freebsd!
sleeptight!
The main thing about BSD is that it doesn't seem to be very much fun (in a way that is what the article says too).
Partly, that's a reflection of simple numbers - there are more of us Linux hackers out there. partly it's accessibility (read the posts here where people boast of how difficult it is to install the thing). Partly it's a different culture - I can get away with writing some not very good Linux drivers for odd boxes because other people will improve them - people welcome the work because it's a start and don't carp that it's poor engineering.
I use *BSD a bit and I am not interested in any sort of religious warfare, but BSD is just too *serious* for a weekend hacker like me.
Actually, we all host our sites on your box. So does CI Host. Thanks!
- - - Non Caffeine Drink or Drink Error
FreeBSD can install its own MBR. It just doesn't, by default.
Linux can install its own MBR. Most distros do, by default.
As far as the browser bit, so what? I can set up a Slackware Linux system with no browser, and it's still completely functional, in that it doesn't crash, and everything that is installed runs correctly.
FreeBSD is a pretty good OS as far as unix variants goes. It's reliability is well known, the linux compatibility is nice and if you don't touch it at all after you install the OS, everything works pretty well. The problem is that Linux gets all the press, Windows owns the market and OS X has FreeBSD underneath and a GUI that kicks it's butt to hell and back (and any X based interface for that matter).
I've always been a BSD fan when it comes to my Unix flavors and I just started working for a company that bases it's products off FreeBSD. So I have a FreeBSD workstation set up in my cube, like pretty much everyone else. I decided to install Mozilla on my pretty much stock as a rock 4.9 system. Dependencies made me upgrade a few things and next thing I know, Nautilus crashes on launch. I fuss with it, start reinstalling new versions of every library known to man that's remotely related and after a week, I gave up and installed 4.10. Had it working great until I added KDE into the mix, now, once again, Nautilus crashes on launch, but for another reason. Some lib got upgraded and broke all the linkage.
My current plan is to install distros only, no packages and then just do ports manually using make install. It was still compiling crap when I left work today, but I've written off experimenting with KDE and I'm just going to stick with Gnome as I prefer it anyways.
As long as you don't try to upgrade anything, FreeBSD is rock solid, powerful and pretty straightforward for a unix system. But you'll be damned to hell if you want to install Apache 2.0 or upgrade something. You don't see this issues with Windows or OS X. And while I've run into rpm hell on Linux (I do source only now), I don't recall having such problems on a Linux box. Then again, I'd never use Linux as a workstation unless I HAD to...
Kind of sad that FreeBSD is slowly dying, I think it's better than Linux. But it's probably too late to shift the winds of change, so we'll be stuck wtih the oddities of Linux forevermore, at least for that Unix like alternative to windows on Intel platforms.