FreeBSD has binary repositories as well plus even it's source repositories (read: ports) is just are reliable as the best Linux has to offer.
Furthermore, ZFS is a killer feature (yes, I know Linux has BtrFS, but as far as I know it's still not yet classed as 'stable' - while ZFS is already tried, tested and depended upon in many servers right across the globe).
And personally, I think FreeBSD has a lot saner defaults than Ubuntu Server.
/Laurence (FreeBSD and Slackware user for the last 10 years)
I disagree about ports being as reliable as package management on Ubuntu. For me, it was always super hairy, even with years of Portage/emerge experience on Gentoo.
Apt is just buttery smooth.
Also, part of the reason I switched was performance. Our LAMP-ish stack on the same hardware was able to serve like 25-30% more requests per second on Ubuntu vs. FreeBSD. But this is a non-issue for a homeserver.
Is it considered production ready yet?
> I disagree about ports being as reliable as package management on Ubuntu. For me, it was always super hairy, even with years of Portage/emerge experience on Gentoo.
Ports have always been pretty crap for upgrades. There simply isn't enough metadata to do it reliably, so we're stuck with reading /usr/ports/UPDATING and being careful with whatever third party tool we're using to manage it all.
This is compounded by there being no "stable" branches - everything in ports happens on trunk, and everyone's expected to follow that. If you're looking for Debian-stable-style backporting of security fixes and sticking with the same version of Apache for half a decade, FreeBSD probably isn't for you.
> Apt is just buttery smooth.
pkgng is buttery smoother (http://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng/).
When was the last time someone encountered a task that was impossible to perform due to limited resource management (unless you're working with experimental stuff)? Most people come up with better strategies, or they're too stupid to think of alternatives.
As someone that's used Slackware AND FreeBSD heavily (I ran Slackware as a desktop for a year around 2008 before switching to Gentoo and have used FreeBSD in a high-volume server environment)- my advice is NEITHER.
I use Ubuntu Server now. I rather get shit done with a heavily-used, well-supported Linux distro instead of dealing with package hell and compiling most everything from source.