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A comment on Ask YC: Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux?.

Re:Ask YC: Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux? by andrewf on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @01:45PM (#88326)
The ports system is markedly inferior IMO to Debian / Ubuntu's package collection: no real stable tree, build from source, tweaking options at build time is encouraged. This is a moot point for things you were going to build from source anyway.

Niche pieces of software are absent; valgrind for FreeBSD is a fork that doesn't support amd64 last time I checked.

There are less people out there running the exact same application binary + underlying OS as you, which means you're less likely to find people who've had (and solved) the same issue as you.

Using it for your desktop is a bit masochistic. Widespread virtualisation means this isn't really an issue anymore - you can have a VM that mirrors your production setup.

We're still using FreeBSD and aren't likely to change anytime soon. I agree with everything aristus said.

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Re:Ask YC: Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux? by mberning on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @08:04PM (#88478)
I disagree on the ports part. I like it much better than any other package management system I've tried. For most common apps you can get a pre-built package with 'pkg_add -r'. They really stepped up their game when they embraced portsnap and let cvsup ride off into the sunset.

And if you need something special and/or exotic it isn't really that hard to build from scratch. I can guarantee 90% of the dependencies can be installed as a pre-built package.

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Re:Ask YC: Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux? by rkts on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @08:09PM (#88481)
I disagree strongly on the ports collection. I find it more flexible, up-to-date and easy to use than Debian's packages.
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Re:Ask YC: Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux? by andrewf on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @12:19AM (#88591)
The up-to-date bit is my main issue. AFAIK the FreeBSD ports tree is never forked into a release branch which receives security updates and nothing else. And you'll find randomly broken stuff from time to time.
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