OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?

Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."

Comments

Re:Article is trollbait

[Norsefire]

I knew when I was composing this question that someone would accuse it of being trolling or flamebait, this is the internet after all and any attempt to compare things on the internet must be trolling, right?

You have been trolled.

Nope. They are the distros I tried. Gentoo for its compiled-from-source nature, Gobo for its new approach on the filesystem, and Arch because it was recommended that I try it. All had their hangups but if I was sticking with Linux I would probably use Arch.

Still trolled by gentoo -O flag weenies, aren't we?

I also like setting compile-time options, applying patches etc. that you can't do with packages.

This is a good choice

Yeah ... but I feel like a change :-)

No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don't call it Slowaris for nothing, y'know.

Now who's trolling/flambating?

Well, it is Sun, after all. They did write the bloody thing. But don't forget that ZFS has its own overhead, so if you don't have a use for it, you're wasting your time and your system resources.

I have plenty of use for ZFS, it was one the main factors in narrowing my choice down to FreeBSD and OSOL.

Why? Not unless you have a specific reason to. You're already running a stable operating system that works on your hardware. Have you looked to see if the drivers you want are available? If it supports your hardware, go for it. If not, why put yourself through hell?

I have both OSOL and FreeBSD installed already. But there's only one of me so I can't use both. So I wanted to see what the general opinion about those two was.

Doesn't make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it's crap.

No it doesn't, I was merely mentioning some differences.

Re:Performance boost?

[drinkypoo]

And for, perhaps, 4-5 packages that you may want to recompile with highest optimizations possible, well - that's what the source packages are there for.

Uh, yeah, that was my point. There's little to no point to rebuilding the whole system, since it only makes a difference for a handful of applications. And I explicitly mentioned previously that you could build your own debian packages... In fact, I have stuff on a PPA. So what were you trying to say again?