What are the major differences between FreeBSD and Linux?

installation differs
device names differs
file system differs
some file locations differs
few commands differ , some are specific to bsd
ports to installed software by compiling to optimize it(dependencies management) or
packages installation with a tool with dependencies resolved

i think moderators explain other concepts in detail in this forum.

if you have already used gentoo think of gentoo like bsd for linux but bsd is not linux even if most linux packages can be used on bsd.

The differences can be found here

edited as an apology for contributing to wasted bandwidth

Yes vector, you can accomplish circular linking, that's not terribly clever. If you don't have anything helpful to add, you might want to consider not posting. That also happens to be rule #4 of LQ. In case you've forgotten the rules, you may read them here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

Sorry, I think I did. Perhaps the link should have been to Google.

Any way, rather than answering this question myself for the 93849283291st time, I'll just point you to this link:
BSD for Linux Users

It's not the best written or most solidly researched article in the world, but it gives you a pretty good idea what the differences are. While the article is written about FreeBSD, it more or less represents the other BSDs too.

You should just add that to the "read before posting" section.

Yeah, I meant to and I got distracted. I'll do it right now.

Are people switching from Linux to BSD or the other way around?

Depends what you're talking about. In general, personal users switch from Linux to BSD because they like the orderliness and the completeness of the documentation.

On the commercial side, some web hosting sites and corporate sites are switching from BSD to Linux because there are more admins who understand Linux now, so it's easier to get staff, and because most sites now have at least some platforms that run Linux, so it's easier to standardized to Linux rather than having a mixture of Solaris + BSD + Linux + whatever else.

There are very relatively sites that run BSD platforms (mostly because right when BSD started getting popular, it was sued by AT&T [just like SCO and Linux] and that caused a lot of people to not use it). That's not to say it isn't well-liked, on the countrary Yahoo! (for example) uses FreeBSD for nearly all of their platforms. There are, however a huge number of proprietary networking platforms, operating systems, and appliances built on BSD or modeled after BSD. This is because the BSD license is much more commercial-friendly, dispite what GPL zealots might have you believe.

So it all depends how you look at it. I can say that from my experience, I've known quite a few people switch from Linux to BSD, but hardly anyone switch from BSD to Linux.

I was gonna say, probably from Linux to FreeBSD. Once you go to *BSD, you often stay (unless you have a new hardware problem). Even java works in FreeBSD now.

Good to know. Which would a newbie *NIX user prefer to use?

apache363, ofcourse its left to the user as its a matter of taste rather than anything else. !!
But most people who are new to *nix play with linux (as it is simpler), then switch to bsd (which i dont know why yet!)

You switch to bsd when you get tired of poor documentation, random file system locations for files and dependancy hell. Or you just get pissed at all the stupid GPL politics.

Are there any annoyances with BSD that would make a user sorry they switched or even switch back?