As I said, there was nothing wrong with Linux that made me start looking for fun elsewhere. Linux is a very good operating system. BUT. It is not the only good operating system out there. And as I have a rather annoying personal trait of getting bored with things that don’t challenge me mentally, I am constantly looking for things that stretch my mind. Enter FreeBSD–a UNIX Operating System that traces its roots back to the prestigious BSD4.4 UNIX OS (as oppposed to the Linux Operating System–which has no such claims to illustrious kernel heritages–the entire kernel is written from scratch by Linus Torvalds and a world-wide team of volunteers).

Anyhoo, of the BSD variants out there in the wild (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc.), FreeBSD seems to me to do the best job of making as many applications/packages available to its user-base as possible (this is accomplished through FreeBSD’s ports system), while still maintaining a very good and solid kernel. As for my personal experience, I run FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE on a Compaq Armada 7800, and I have not had ANY problems whatsoever in being able to run any application that I need to. Sound works beautifully. Cranky Compaq ThunderLan ethernet NIC works beautifully. X works beautifully. APM works beautifully. Hardware-wise, everything works (let’s all say it together now) beautifully. Software-wise, I’ve not found any applications that I simply could not run in FreeBSD. This includes StarOffice, gkrellm, gimp, xmms, grip, jpilot (for my Palm Pilot interface), gnome, kde, and a HOST of others that I’ll not bore you with here. Again, suffice it to say that I haven’t missed out on anything that I want to use because I choose to run FreeBSD rather than Linux.

But the REAL reason that I choose FreeBSD over Linux these days is 4-fold.

• First, FreeBSD does a MUCH better job of handling memory-management than does Linux. What does this mean? I’ve been running FreeBSD with apache/X/php4/netscape/etc. on my work machine for a month now and I still have half of my RAM free–and my swap partition is only 3% full. Now, on almost exactly the same machine, I have had the same services running on a Linux machine, and my RAM is 75% used up–but I also show having 50% of my swap partition used up.
• Second, FreeBSD seems to do a much better job of hard drive I/O handling. There is a noticeable difference between my laptop and my friend’s laptop (IDENTICAL laptops, mind you) with me running FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE and him running Linux 2.2.16, when it comes to reading/writing large files, or large amounts of small files.
• Third, I REALLY like the way packages are handled with FreeBSD via the ports system. Nice thing #1–and this is very similar to the way that debian Linux handles packages via their “apt” functionality–if I want to install a program, say “the Gimp” graphics package, all I have to do is to “cd /usr/ports/graphics/gimp1” and do “make install”. That’s it. FreeBSD’s ports system takes care of the rest. It ftp’s the Gimp package from wherever it needs to, and then recursively checks all dependencies that the Gimp may need–and if it finds that I’m missing any, it will automatically fetch them, make then, and install them, before continuing on with its installation of the Gimp. Very nice. Nice thing #2–as an added benefit of handling package compilation on a local level, you get to use compilation optimizations that make the resultant executable run much faster on your machine than, say, a generic Gimp binary that you find in an RPM that was compiled with no optimizations so that it would be able to run on as many different machines as possible.
• Fourth–and this is probably a direct result of the first two points–FreeBSD FEELS WAY FASTER than Linux. I mean, it’s like driving a Ferrari as opposed to a Honda Civic. Mind you, they’re both better than a Geo Metro, but once you’ve felt the responsiveness of a Ferrari, it’s hard to go back to a Civic. =:)

Anyway, I hope that you, the discriminating reader, allow yourself to look around at all the options available to you as a user of a computer. Believe me, there are far-better things that you could be spending your time doing than pressing <Control+Alt+Delete> whenever your Microsoft-driven computer decides that it’s tired and needs to be rebooted. =:) And there’s a LOT more work that you could be getting done instead of waiting for that accursed Windows hourglass to disappear because the operating system you are stuck running can’t handle all the tasks you want to be, need to be, and should be able to run at the same time. Check out Linux. Check out FreeBSD. Granted, they’re not for everyone. But they may be just the thing that you’ve always been looking for and not known it.