This thread has now headed into off-topic territory. So to continue the discussion, I'm making a new thread for the topic.
Basically the idea is to update or at least, discuss the FreeBSD comparison grid as shown here that is a decade old or so. Probably a lot of the left hand side topics are good to keep. They are:
Not sure if this is the best place to really develop something, but probably a lot of us don't have write access to the wiki which would be a more logical place to create something. However, we can at least flesh out a lot of the content perhaps? Do we continue with the same 3 OS, or include some others?
I'll continue with a comment from the parent thread.
I can think of several things that BSD has over Windows. Ports. There may be FOSS for windows but the model of surfing and downloading software is not as good as package repositories or ports. Linux repository system is (IMO) superior to FreeBSD packages as there is a method to ensure that you can verify security hashes etc.
Also, just being able to string stuff together in a shell via pipes natively kicks ass over cygwin. Cygwin is good if you are stuck with Windows, but it's still a pale substitute.
I also made a stab at the "filesystem" bit.
Filesystem
FreeBSD
Only FreeBSD and Solaris have ZFS. There is no other production filesystem anywhere else that can guarantee data integrity and usability to the same extent as ZFS. ZFS can put sha256 hashes on every block of data to allow verification that silent data corruption has not occurred, and heal it when it does (provided that sufficient redundancy is provisioned).
By completely rethinking the needs of filesystems in today's world, ZFS offers many other advantages. ZFS removes the pain of dealing with legacy filesystem issues. Want to move a small amount of data on a large pool to a smaller pool? No problem. Ditto with upgrading the pool size - whether you can do it or not depends on the amount of data you have, not on how big you have made a partition. Want to cache reads and writes with SSDs? Do so with one command.
Linux, Windows etc.
Not sure what to say here. There is nothing to get excited about for me. It works provided you use a HDD that doesn't give you bad sectors or otherwise. Might be fast, but then so is piping your data to /dev/null.
Basically the idea is to update or at least, discuss the FreeBSD comparison grid as shown here that is a decade old or so. Probably a lot of the left hand side topics are good to keep. They are:
- Reliability
- Security
- Performance
- Development Environment
- Development Infrastructure
- Support
- Price and Total Cost of Ownership
- Filesystem
- Device Drivers
- Commercial Applications
- Free Applications
Not sure if this is the best place to really develop something, but probably a lot of us don't have write access to the wiki which would be a more logical place to create something. However, we can at least flesh out a lot of the content perhaps? Do we continue with the same 3 OS, or include some others?
I'll continue with a comment from the parent thread.
The only thing I miss from Windows is the games. Even that is an advantage if you are a game addict. No other tool I can think of comes with built-in productivity killers.Zare said:While I agree that programming is easier on FreeBSD than on Linux distributions, because of cohesive, complete OS and stable API/ABI, Windows programmers have access to tools we use, and a helluva lot more.
I can think of several things that BSD has over Windows. Ports. There may be FOSS for windows but the model of surfing and downloading software is not as good as package repositories or ports. Linux repository system is (IMO) superior to FreeBSD packages as there is a method to ensure that you can verify security hashes etc.
Also, just being able to string stuff together in a shell via pipes natively kicks ass over cygwin. Cygwin is good if you are stuck with Windows, but it's still a pale substitute.
I also made a stab at the "filesystem" bit.
Filesystem
FreeBSD
Only FreeBSD and Solaris have ZFS. There is no other production filesystem anywhere else that can guarantee data integrity and usability to the same extent as ZFS. ZFS can put sha256 hashes on every block of data to allow verification that silent data corruption has not occurred, and heal it when it does (provided that sufficient redundancy is provisioned).
By completely rethinking the needs of filesystems in today's world, ZFS offers many other advantages. ZFS removes the pain of dealing with legacy filesystem issues. Want to move a small amount of data on a large pool to a smaller pool? No problem. Ditto with upgrading the pool size - whether you can do it or not depends on the amount of data you have, not on how big you have made a partition. Want to cache reads and writes with SSDs? Do so with one command.
Linux, Windows etc.
Not sure what to say here. There is nothing to get excited about for me. It works provided you use a HDD that doesn't give you bad sectors or otherwise. Might be fast, but then so is piping your data to /dev/null.