Just earlier, I was thinking what the purpose of FreeBSD is for. I think it's a distro that runs a server, but I was thinking that it may be a desktop distro with server capatabilities. I want to run it as a server distro. I want to read your opinion.

That depends on the end user.

There are many FreeBSD servers all over the place and they don't run the X-Windows System, they just run console mode.

And then there are many people that use it with the X-Windows System GUI as their home box with server services enabled because they can and have the constant bandwidth to back them up.

So the question or query you are pondering can be asked of any operating system with the same answers I supplied, plus more for them and from me if so inclined.

Track record is what you need to research.

FreeBSD bugs and exploit reported versus Linux bugs and exploits reported.

And one last thing from me.... FreeBSD isn't a distro, it's an operating system. RedHat or SuSE are distro's because they are based on Linux.

All the BSD's are servers.

Having said that -- I run the same release of FreeBSD on my webservers (No X or anything like that) that I have on my laptop (X and XFCE).

A machine's roll in life is defined by the duty that it fulfills. To answer the question I think you're really asking though -- Yes, BSD makes for better servers than Linux does.

Your right sigsegv! I read an article about setting up a Samba server and all of the setting up requires puttting text commands into the console, and really the obvious distro that supplies Samba is Red Hat.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean. You can build samba on just about any *NIX, and SWAT (a GUI kind of thing) is available on all of them. RedHat, Drake, Fedora, *BSD, Solaris and just about everything else.

I'd personally recommend doing the configuration in vi in a console, but mostly just so the user will learn something about what the parameters actually do ...

If you select End User or above during a Solaris install, samba will be installed with the OS. Ditto apache and a variety of other servers.


In the past I have used FreeBSD/X/KDE as a desktop. Now that I have a Mac, I use OSX on it and my PC has been rebirthed with an X-less FreeBSD install, and acts as a file server using NFS.

I use FreeBSD soley as a desktop right now.It's great with quake 1 2 and 3 offering better mouse reaction time/feel than XP or some linux distros.

Doom3 runs pretty well on it to.

I plan to use it for a quake server as soon as I find a hard drive for the box in my basement.

It isn't really either. Thanks to ports you can mold it however you want.

FreeBSD definitely makes a better server than Linux. But it also makes a very nice desktop. In general Linux is far more geared towards being a desktop OS than *BSD is. But that by no means makes it any less capable. The only things that require a little more work is stuff like Java and other multimedia plugins and whatnot.. I'm currently dual-booting FreeBSD 5.3 and ArchLinux on my notebook. FreeBSD is fantastic with portupgrade and portaudit. Portupgrade is the system updating tool, and portaudit checks against all installed ports to see if there have been any security advisories released against them. If so, it tells you what is wrong with what program, then you simply portupgrade it to it most current version. Personally I do a full cvsup daily of ports, and a full portupgrade rebuild every weekend. (I don't have gnome/kde/openoffice installed so I just start it before I go to bed and it's finished by the time I get up.

First, BSDs are not "distros". "Distro" is a Linux term that only applies to OSs with Linux kernels. Each BSD has entirely it's own kernel.

FreeBSD is predominately a server OS. It makes a good functional workstation for network engineers, security engineers, etc especially for NOC or such duties. You can use whatever desktop environment you want on it, but personal user functionality really isn't a huge priority for FreeBSD.

Yahoo servers have been running on FreeBSD for many years now .. thats answer enough .. I am using FBSD on my laptop for about 1 year now and I can say its really not geared towards a desktop .. in the sense .. dont expect graphical anything .. installation/configuration/patches etc ... all BSDs are more servers and less workstations ..

FreeBSD is what you make it. It can be a very good server OS or a very good desktop OS (although I think many Linux distros makes a better desktop OS than FreeBSD out of the box). Many big companies use FreeBSD on their servers, but I think its a bit questionable to say FreeBSD is a better server OS than Linux because this depends on many things including the sysadmin.

I find FreeBSD to be a very good development workstation.

I wouldn't use FreeBSD on a desktop or laptop because everything is compiled from source. To me, it does not feel right to have your desktop run all night for upgrades. On a server, that might be OK because you have it up 24/7 anyway.

For the same reason, I wouldn't use Gentoo or any other source-based Linux distro as a desktop.

So to me, FreeBSD is really a server OS.

KDE runs on FreeBSD. Everything you need in a desktop exists in FreeBSD. nVidia ships some drivers for FreeBSD too. An interesting feature is that you can run Linux binaries. It's used to run Acrobat Reader and the Flash plugin.