Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
There is a ton of pros and cons in practical scenario most of them business related.
FreeBSD is a far more stable OS than Linux in every aspect for server performance
Actually we were, at the time, almost exclusively a FreeBSD house; we obviously needed Windows for the Exchange servers, but leaving those out the infra was probably 90/10 FreeBSD/Linux, with Linux use mostly restricted to niches where we needed to run something with a paid license, VM hosting, or some really complicated homegrown network test harness stuff that FreeBSD couldn’t do. (Trust me, I had to definitively prove FreeBSD couldn’t before the zealots would let me use it.) FWIW, FreeBSD 4, which was still the “old stable” at the time, sucked almost as hard as OS X did, but the improved threading and SMP support in 5.x fixed a lot of sins.
But yes, in a business it’s all about TCO and efficiency, and buying Xserves to run generic open source server software when the other option was using the OS we already knew inside out and was more performant on cheaper hardware was obviously the stupidest idea ever. Yes, FreeBSD is “harder” to install from scratch off a CD than OS X, but we weren’t doing that; we already had built the infrastructure to PXE boot and install several versions of BSD and Linux with scripted hands-off setup on the Xeon servers we were getting essentially for free. Sure, I suppose if we’d bought enough Xserves we could have set up the infrastructure to auto-install them, but unless we had some need to run Apple specific server products it would have all been a massive waste of time. Bleah.