New to FreeBSD

[John Almberg]

> Interested in who uses FreeBSD and in what way
> FreeBSD is better than Linux for servers.
>

Everyone else has tackled the book part of this question. I'll answer  
the second...

I also switched from Linux to FreeBSD (Actually, the complete path  
was VAX Unix -> MS-DOS -> Windows -> Linux -> FreeBSD/Mac OS X, but  
that's a longer story!)

The main reason for me was I am really an application programmer who  
gradually has been forced to depend less on guys in white coats to  
manage the servers (oh, those were the days!) to having to do it  
myself (and this is progress...)

Linux was vastly superior to the whole M$ approach, but I found the  
whole Linux thing too chaotic for my taste. Every distribution seemed  
to have its own way of doing things. Linux books are filled with  
things like "if you have Fedora, do this, if you have Debian, do  
that, if you have SUSE, do this other thing." What a pain.

I love the fact that you can go very far with FreeBSD with an old  
copy of "The Complete FreeBSD". It may not cover the newer stuff, but  
the older stuff hasn't changed all that much. And there are no  
'switch' statements embedded in the book to cover 18 different  
distributions. There may not be as many FreeBSD books as there are  
for Linux, but maybe that's because there doesn't need to be! And  
that's a plus in my book.

In short, FreeBSD is stable, it's under control, and you always know  
what to expect. It seems to me, that is the minimum requirement for  
an operating system. FreeBSD has given me a chance to relax for the  
first time in years.

Thank you FreeBSD team!

-- John