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

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are commie Operating Systems you have there. Get some Windows 7 and be a good patriot.

Just think about what you're saying in the future.

They're both good. What are you doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're looking to learn something new, OpenSolaris is the way I'd go. Lots of commercial enterprises use Solaris, so you're learning a skill that is of direct to a great many businesses.

Of course, that's not to say that Solaris is the only Unix out there - I'm certain that FreeBSD is used in commercial enterprises as well, just not at as high a level as Solaris is. And, ultimately, learning the idiosyncrasies of more than one Unix environment means that you're well placed to adapt if (for example) you find yourself maintaining an AIX or HP-UX host - you've already had the pain of dealing with the differences between FreeBSD/Solaris and Linux, so the next step won't be quite so difficult.

Re:Go the whole hog...

[MROD]

Ah, but OpenSolaris isn't a clone, it's one of the true heirs to the throne, a direct descendent of the original UNIX lineage.

The *BSD family are now cousins to the original UNIX as all the original code was excised to make the 4.3BSD-lite codebase.

Can give a boost even with same instruction set.

[spaceturtle]

You can also gain some performance by tweaking code for different processor types, even if they have the same instruction set. One example would avoiding XOR swaps on CPUs that have instruction pipelining, which is independent of the instruction set.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm

This maybe wasn't the best example since XOR swaps are rarely useful anyway. I suspect that other things like word (mis)alignment and varying cache miss costs may be a factor for different processors.

Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.

I have a PROBLEM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in quite a predicament. My boss hired me because I bullshitted my way through an interview, but really I don't know shit from shinola when it comes to servers and operating systems and such. I can play WoW... HELP ME PLEASE.

hm

[Danzigism]

Although I always enjoy the opportunity to recommend FreeBSD to somebody, I didn't really get an explanation of your needs. Are you going to be running servers? Desktop? Or just having fun? I imagine that you're just going to have some fun since you just want to learn something new. In that case I'd definitely go with FreeBSD. It is a great "learning" OS and is well documented thanks to the Handbook. The /usr/ports collection has the source code for just about any piece of software you'd ever need, and the dependencies are all taken care of for you. You get some pretty awesome hardware support, server daemons are incredibly easy to configure, it is robust as all hell, doesn't use a lot of resources, can also make a great desktop OS, lots of smart people on IRC you can get help from, and countless amounts of other things. Additionally I'd go with FreeBSD because there are a large percentage of servers on the internet use this OS. If IT is your profession, it definitely won't hurt to learn FreeBSD. All you need to know is, /etc/rc.conf and /usr/ports. Then you just move on from there :-) Good luck!

Re:FreeVMS

[bpechter]

Instead of FreeVMS which isn't ready for prime time... Get the OpenVMS hobbiest edition, load up SimH and run OpenVMS on a real emulated Vax. For fun you could boot OpenBSD, NetBSD or BSD4.x on the emulated Vax.

As far as Solaris vs. BSD -- I run 'em both here. Solaris mostly on Sparc and BSD on x86. I've done Solaris x86
and it's ok, but it's really fun to set up a jumpstart server and load up some old Sparcs.

I've even got SunOS 4.1.4 up...

Take a look at the software available on the http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ site. A ton of VMS languages including C, ADA, Pascal, Macro32... TCP/IP and Clustering.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

Use CP/M

[mwvdlee]

Since you're not telling us what you're actually planning to do with the OS, might as well advice some random OS based on no reason whatsoever.