I'm still a pretty big noob to the Linux/UNIX world, so I was wondering why you chose FreeBSD? What advantages does it have/How does it differ from Linux distros?
(Skip down for tl;dr.)
I chose FreeBSD because it has _two_ (excellent) official repositories instead of one. First it has a standard binary package manager like the package manager of Arch or Ubuntu, a "binary" package manager is one that downloads and installs precompiled binaries, code that has already been compiled. Secondly it offers a source code repository which you can use to compile and install packages from source code (also in one single command just like with the binary package manager).
There are two main differences between precompiled binaries and binaries you compile yourself:
1. Binaries you compile yourself run a fuckton faster since they are compiled to be optimized for your specific system whereas precompiled binaries are compiled generically to fit many systems and thus not optimized.
2. When compiling yourself you get to choose which optional features your binary should support (like a certain type of drivers for a media player). In FreeBSD, unless you have turned this feature off, you are presented with a list (navigate selection up and down with arrow keys, press space to check the checkbox of current selection and enter to continue) of optional features to add support for each time you compile from source using the repository. Disabling support for features you don't need leads to smaller packages and even faster packages.
Compiling from source can be done on any distro, but the general procedure requires you to:
1. Search the internet for your package.
2. Download a source code archive.
3. Extract the archive and go into the extracted directory.
4. Run './configure' and go to step 1 for each missing dependency it tells you about, and search for solutions for each problem it comes up with.
5. Run 'make' and search for solutions for each problem it comes up with and then 'make install'.
Whereas in FreeBSD you only type one command to have all of this automatically done for you without any problems as the packages in the repository are made specfically for FreeBSD and are very stable (hence unfortunately slow updates as I mentioned previously). I have seen a few similar solutions for other distros, but none have been official, with the exception of Gentoo's official package manager which works like this except is a bit more complicated and more importantly will break your system unless you know exactly what you are doing, and none have worked nearly as good as FreeBSDs.
The thing about compiling from source is that it takes time, which in my opinion is really worth it to get faster packages for the most part, and for those small programs where performance is irrelevant you can still use FreeBSDs binary package manager which is up to par with any other, except again for the slow updates.
tl;dr: FreeBSD gets you fucking fast packages without any hassle, the disadvantage is that updates for these packages are slow.
TheLifeRuiner said:
And most importantly, what do you use it for?
Programming, media, internet, running any non-game windows application in a VM (virtual machine, _full_ OS running virtually in a window). These things are pretty much the only things I do on a computer, for the odd occasion when I want to play a game I boot into my XP partition since gaming on any Unix-like (OS X partly excluded) is terrible for the most part.
QUOTE(TheLifeRuiner @ Mar 3 2011, 10:57 AM)
I had to switch back to Windows though because of school
