hey, The main disadvantage when compared to linux is the lack of driver support. because freebsd uses a different driver api than linux, its harder to port linux drivers to it and there are license issues when porting drivers. freeebsd supports almost as much drivers in the server space as linux, but when it comes to destop drivers, its seriously lacking. there are few drivers in PCMCIA, wireless networking (intel released binary wireless drivers a few days ago for freebsd, an exception), ACPI etc. freebsd uses a version of OSS sound drivers, while dragonfly has moved to their own csound and linux uses alsa which has much better latency and driver support.
freebsd has no integrated reliable journaling filesystem, you can get a few fs like reiser and xfs to run on it, but they are not stable. FFS is pretty decent in terms of server filesystem, but the rest of the world has long since moved on (read ext3, ZFS etc). the packaging can be an advantage at times, expecially the ports system which offers immence customisability, but most of the time, pkg_tools is a pain, because it has no fine grained pkg management, upgrades can break core, no really easy front-end like synaptic (there are a few crap front ends like pirut, sometimes i think fedora copies too much bsd :P). the installer is infamous for having a partioning bug in it for the last few years or so, J.hubbard's gratest legacy perhaps. point being the text based installer is archane comapred to ubuntu or fedora's. its more like the slackware installer. unless you are an uber geek, install over http or NFS are a pain too. but i dont know if many linux supports this either. also no kickstart. freebsd has'nt yet support for many of the freedesktop.org components like d-bus and hal, there are hacks, but they crash more often than they run. MYSQL: this is huge disadvantage, freebsd mysql innodb perfomance is drastically worse in production WHEN COMPARED to linux servers, such as RHEL or suse enterprise. kepp in mind that when compared to a desktop optimised linux distro, such as ubuntu or mandrake, its compares favourably. thats all I can think of. oh yeah, binary codec-hacks etc run terribly, so forget/put-up with bsd for multimedia stuff. bib me. BKR On 3/8/07, Susanth K <susanthoffline at gmail.com> wrote: > Hai, > > Could any one help me, please. > > > I would like to know the disadvantages of FreeBSD when compared to LINUX > (Both in terms of license and performance.) > How good is FreeBSD in SMP ? howmany processors do FreeBSD Support > > THANKS IN ADVANCE > > > SUSANTH K > > _______________________________________________ > Mailinglist mailing list > Mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org > http://ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org > >
