[harrytuttle]

Wonderful!

I may actually consider dumping Debian for FreeBSD 10.

I've never been totally happy with Linux after moving off "proper" UNIX machines. I had a FreeBSD 4.4 machine floating around for years which I was rather happy with but drifted off to Linux-land primarily due to convenience when it came to Flash and audio.

So many compelling reasons to switch back to FreeBSD now.

[maheart]

What exactly is attracting you to FreeBSD?

I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port". That is, it offers the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel.

So, depending on what you're looking for, you might be able to gain access to the best of both worlds.

If you're after the FreeBSD experience (i.e. the community, the BSD command line utils, ports, and the preference for permissive licenses), then I guess Debian/kFreeBSD really isn't of any interest to you.

[harrytuttle]

Well the main things for me are

1. feels closer to "old fashioned non-Canonical'ed UNIX" which I was brought up on.

2. Way less politics due to license.

3. Less crazy forking and wheel reinventing (basically everything Ubuntu isn't).

4. It has orders of magnitude better documentation

5. pkgng is actually really nice

6. separation of core OS vs ports/packages so easy to stage updates compared to catch all Linux distros.

7. pf is miles better than iptables

8. ZFS.

9. I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting in my cupboard which Linux doens't like.

10. Has valgrind that works properly unlike the other BSD's.

That's about it but it's enough.

My use cases are: personal use, professional use (devops), professional use (production).

[jonhohle]

> I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port"

I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) for more than a decade, and I've never understood the appeal of apt or the other Debian tools. In my experience, they just don't work as well as ports, constantly require adding additional repositories (because the official repository is missing some relatively popular package for who knows what reason) - which may or may not conflict with others I have -, and in general, are just more work than ports, portage, or MacPorts.

Inflicting apt on a system with a superior package management system seems like a sysadmin's bright idea - having no experience with ports or other package managers.

I've used apt on several systems - Maemo, Debian, Ubuntu, OS X (as fink), and always found it to be one of the weakest package managers (I've even had better experience with yum/RPM).

[mavhc]

I use debian/kfreebsd on my server so I can use zfs. Had Freebsd previously, but the lack of a Stable ports tree meant updating broke things often.

Although many things don't work on debian/kfreebsd, and searching for help is tricky, do I go the debian way or the freebsd way, it's always updated with few problems.

[lmm]

I've heard Debian/kFreeBSD has poor multithreading support because it's built against glibc/libpthread rather than the native freebsd libc (which has an NPTL-equivalent).