Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

The worst that can happen is porting GCC features over to a GPL-licensed Clang fork.

You are correct. It would be more accurate to say 'remote attack' with an up-to-date stable release. The point could be scaled back to say that FreeBSD has undergone extensive peer-review and security auditing to the point that the stable branches have not seen a remotely exploitable security vulnerability in a long time.

That said, FreeBSD doesn't excuse sysadmins from not being vigilant with monitoring advisories and keeping their systems up to date. Nor does it prevent vulnerabilities being introduced through installed userland software or other applications.

One benefit would be that with patches and ports, you can patch any vulnerability in a service without being forced to upgrade to a new version that might have incompatibilities with your system or that might introduce performance degradation.

You see this all the time with PHP, sysadmins run binary upgrades on the packages because of a security vulnerability, only for the website to spit out a bunch of warnings about functions that have been deprecated in the new version.

Now that EC2 has support for PV-Grub you can almost run FreeBSD there. It would seem the insistence of FreeBSD to be booted from the loader is going to make it hard to run there.

That's a bit like complaining that when I use the BSDs they don't have documentation in Microsoft CHM format, or that they put stuff in /usr/local.

Different systems simply have different conventions, and GNU picked GNU Info over man pages. That bastard GNU tar(1) man page was created because Debian has a policy that everything must have a manpage.

I like Unix, but the GNU Info format solved some real issues with man. It has built-in index and cross-reference metadata, scales to the size of entire books (the FreeBSD manual would be a single info page), and is much easier to write. I much prefer reading info pages to man pages for that reason.

A lot of people seem to dislike GNU info because they confuse the GNU TexInfo / info format with the info(1) program. I'm not a big fan of the default reader (I use the Emacs one instead). But the TexInfo format can be exported to multiple formats and read by multiple programs. Here's the exported GNU Tar documentation for instance: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/index.html

* That point about performance was more about FreeBSD being first with a lot of performance and security improvements. As I said, this argument was a lot easier 5-10 years ago but doesn't apply as much anymore.

* The Mono vs Micro kernel debate between Linux and BSD doesn't apply as much anymore since they both support both. With Linux is varies a lot between distro vendors. Vendor kernels also tend to lag behind the main branch (at least this is my experience, mainly with Debian and Fedora). I find that FreeBSD, as a distro, allows easier kernel optimization especially since the default kernel is tight. Again, this is something that on the Linux side of the argument is the responsibility of the vendors, who approach the issue by providing targeted server and desktop distributions (most do). You are right though that there is very little performance diff between Micro v Mono (see the classic debate from when Linux was announced: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html). I have always preferred only having code on the server that is required by the system (code coverage), and the FreeBSD way of doing this is managed better than any of the Linux distros, IMO.

* As somebody mentioned below, the Linux kernel is very much tied to GCC and its toolchain. It is so tied to it that the Intel compiler uses the Linux kernel as a test for its GCC compatibility mode.

* A BSD port of SELinux is actually part of TrustedBSD, which has in-turn been ported to FreeBSD. There are a bunch of other things that TrustedBSD entails, I can't name them off the top of my head atm, but both SELinux and TrustedBSD line up with orange book

* You are correct that the stable/release cycle of Linux is more up to each distribution, but since there is a step between kernel and distro (which FreeBSD as a total operating system doesn't have) there is a lag there, and a risk of support ceasing (or patches/updates/support suddenly becoming a commercial service, as it did at Red Hat)

In the end it depends on how you define 'better'. It is tiresome to enter debates about benchmarks and features, it is what you are most comfortable with. If you want to hack at a UNIX operating system that is very neat and cool, FreeBSD is a very good choice. If you like knowing what every file and every command does on your system, and prefer a UNIX-like uniformity in how things are done, then FreeBSD is again a good choice.

I would thoroughly recommend all hackers try out FreeBSD and become familiar with it. It will alert you to why some things are done the way they are, and there is a very deep history in that operating system, so at times it feels like opening a time capsule.

Add to that, if you need an OS for commercial purposes, FreeBSD is free as in 'do whatever you want', which can also be an advantage.