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/).
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)