That article is still fairly good of a read, with a couple things slightly out of date, which I will note here simply for pedantry or anyone interested.

BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.

While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular. Specifically, `freebsd-update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.

ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops:

  pool: zroot
  state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
  config:
	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
	  ada0p3    ONLINE       0     0     0
  errors: No known data errors

  > BSD no longer uses CVS

Additional pedantry: This may be true of FreeBSD, but I believe both OpenBSD and NetBSD still use CVS. I think DragonFlyBSD uses git.

What benefits ZFS brings on a single drive laptop? I was informed it is mainly designed for high traffic file servers with redundancy and so forth.

Even with a single drive you still benefit from many of its advantages!

Snapshotting.

Cloning.

Transparent deduplication.

Transparent compression.

Silent corruption detection.

Self-healing (when using copies=2 or higher, obviously the only way to provide redundancy on a single-drive setup).

NFSv4 ACLs.

I run btrfs on my main arch installation. Have for ~6 months. If you get the fsck.btrfs tool (it is upstream) you eliminiate the only real showstopper with btrfs on Linux.

You get the online compression (meaning you use less space and read and write faster on mechanical storage because you have less to read / write at a time), you get the snapshots, you get subvolumes, checksums, etc.

I follow the btrfs development because I'd love to have at least the features of ZFS on Linux. However I would not dare (yet) to use it as a replacement for my current home fileserver (which owns ALL my data).

Does btrfs provide cifs export like ZFS ?

Edit:

from the btrfs wiki https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_btrfs_stable.... :

Is btrfs stable? Short answer: No, it's still considered experimental.

Snapshots

and checksums (bit rot prevention)

I'm amazed at how generally unreliable drives are at retrieving stored data with ZFS checksums in place to highlight the problem - it seems that on average every TB of storages has a problem with a block every half-year or so.

And every 4GB of memory or so if you have ECC turned on.

Jails. Recently I have configured a dedicated server to run nginx + php-fpm in jail: an entire jail consists of two static executable files, a few config files, and a few logs. There's nothing to pwn there, even if there's unpatched stack vulnerability somewhere. Jails are a very impressive security feature of FreeBSD.

Do you know how they compare to Linux Containers?

They are similar.

My trepidation with LXC would be from a documentation POV... Jails are very much known quantities, while LXC is newer, not known for great docs, and thus is probably easier to screw up.

See this HN thread for more discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015172

ZFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) is one advantage of FreeBSD.

Actual design and architecture is the main 'feature'.

First, keep in mind that BSD is an operating system in the same way that Latin is a language: they each live on only in their descendants. Latin became French, Spanish, Italian, and a few others, and BSD became NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Dragonfly BSD. There are different pros and cons to using a BSD operating system, depending on which one you choose. But the common themes are increased security and stability.

For a better answer, the websites of the 4 BSD projects give details on their focuses and strengths.

Actually, I'd say English claims the title of being the truest descendant of Latin. English not only directly uses descendants of Latin vocabulary, it also uses plenty of words from the other Latin descendants. It's kind of like a C++ diamond inheritance pattern.

English actually comes from West Germanic (not Latin). But you're right; there are lots of shared words between Latin and English, and this is mostly due to the historical relationship between England and France.

I like this analogy. OS X is therefore like English; an utterly alien world, colonized by a descendent of the original.

Another FreeBSD discussion a few weeks ago had a bunch of good answers to this question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895022