FreeBSD: Not Exactly Dead

quantumice writes "It would seem that despite being dead and there only being six of us who use it, FreeBSD has clocked up nearly 2.5 million active sites according to Netcraft. So by my estimates that must mean that I and each of my 5 friends run 416 667 sites. That might explain my high bandwidth usage."

Re:Gentlemen

[kwench]

I'd love to... but I still don't understand why everybody is raving about *BSD being dead.

After having learned that Windows XP is a VMS clone [cs.vu.nl] and that Linux is a Minix clone which is a UNIX clone which is a MULTICS clone which is a CTSS clone which is a FMS clone which I have never heard about and which is probably dead, dead, dead [adti.net] I'd think that everything - even BeOS and QNX (and this FreeBSD clone MacOS X) are UNIX-influenced (if not based) and therefore dead, dead, dead. 8-)
I used to prefer FreeBSD over GNU/Linux because of the straightforward install without bells and whistles and the easy way to compile parts of the system. The only disappointing thing is the lack of drivers for my exotic hardware, at least I was so far not able to find working drivers for my external CD-writer, my laptop's USB and a single of my three USB webcams.

Well... then I discovered Gentoo and everything was fine again... 8-)

pair Networks

[rixstep]

pair [pair.com] have been using it all along. They've got well over 100,000 domains running. They're but one company.

Oh yeah - Apple's another...

Trolls rarely be where expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly enough, stories that would seem to be obvious [slashdot.org] troll fodder don't seem to attract all that much troll interest.

Go figure.

I have..

[Anonymous Coward]

1 machine that runs Mac OSX (a Powerbook)
1 machine that runs Windows 2000 (games machine)
1 machine that runs FreeBSD (workhorse server)
1 machine that runs BeOS 5 (old machine, not seriously used)

I consider all of the above to be "best of breed" operating systems. Linux absolutely blows because of the fragmented userbase. I have a hard time caring about it because of the thousand different distributions all doing things differently.

FreeBSD beats the crap out of Linux for:

* Ease of use - extremely well documented, everything is logically organised
* Reliability - they.. shock.. *test* before they release! (unlike Fedora's GRUB which nuked my drive when I tried it)
* Compatibility - the ports tree is fantastic, plus it runs Linux executables

In short: FreeBSD is great. If you've ever become frustrated with Linux, give it a try. I guarantee you'll love it!

Monitoring...

[alexatrit]

This is all rather dependant on the accuracy of Netcraft. Although most of the FreeBSD systems I maintain are identified correctly by Netcraft, there are several that always come back as unknown. Netcraft OS detections seems to be reasonable, but not perfect. Their webserver detection is as accurate as it can be, but uptime checks seem to be even less perfect.

Re:very funny.

[aztektum]

What exactly are you trying to say here?

That BSD is still dead because it's a small number of individual establishments using it, despite the large amount of systems they run it on?

2.5 million servers is still a big number, regardless of how spread out it is. Just b/c people say it's dead doesn't mean 2.5 million servers will be changed to Linux tomorrow.

Re:Gentlemen

[ArbitraryConstant]

The longest I've tracked Gentoo stable without something vital breaking is about 60 days. I've had situations where the stable branch wouldn't compile because some of the packages required a package in the unstable branch. If anyone, anywhere, had tried it in any way on a -stable system before it was released to the stable branch, it would have been caught.

FreeBSD isn't perfect, but it's telling that FreeBSD-current works more consistently than Gentoo-stable. Give Debian-unstable a shot, it's more consistent.