BSD -v- Microsoft -v- Linux – The Debate Revisited
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Loading ...Personally, I recommend Fedora for remote servers and Slackware for home, mainly because they provide an OS solution for whatever you may need. Both of these are Linux distributions, one is (a bit) easier to upgrade than the other, but both are different in their own unique ways.
BSD? Well, honestly, I’d recommend staying as far away as possible from that one. Why? Simply put:
BSD handles things a lot differently than the traditional unix/linux way of thinking. While that’s good if you’re a BSD fan, you won’t be able to get ALL applications compiled under BSD that you could under linux. Why? Because they were designed under a linux box, and those changes, in some cases are just too much to handle.
Example 1:
I was running a text based bbs for a few years. Jumping around from host to host was fun(not really, but hey). At one point, we had a BSD host setup and running for us. I went in to make clean, recompile everything (which, in my traditional coding sense compiled with few errors under a linux box). Lo and behold it took us 2 days just to get the source compiled and working. Great, so we go to login, only to find out that the binary bails on the connection handlers.. Finally, we just gave it up and found a Linux box. After all, we weren’t CHARGING people for the bbs.
Example 2:
Many know I’ve been in the process of coding an online game for the past few years. This was before I started doing online work heavily, and had 2 servers at my disposal. During this time, I jumped from host to host, finally landing @ kyndig. At that time, I got a good year’s worth of work in, unfortunately, he stopped allowing remote_connects to the databases ( I don’t blame him, they can eat bandwidth like nothing), and it was time to find a new host.
Well, I had a year of mysql code put in, that I wasn’t going to erase for anything (it takes ages to setup things just as you want them), unfortunately my only alternatives were.
A>A bsd host
or
B> Turn my own box into a linux box, and run from there. Since I was running cable, it didn’t hurt , but I wanted to try A first.
When we got the code into the box, it took us a good 4 hours before we could get it to compile (configuring this or that or something else), and we never did get it brought up succesfully. Why? memory problems. See, Linux handles things differently that BSD does, and not everyone is going to write their code around BSD handlers. I certainly don’t blame ‘em.
Example 3:
Over the past few months, I’ve been developing a network monitoring solution. This stores data in an sql database on my server, which has been collected from their server. For security reasons, I encrypt everything possible that’s not local, with php I use Turck. Well, I spent a good half hour with turck on client’s server trying to get just the loader installed to no avail. Turck is a pretty good product, pretty well developed but, sadly, it just wasn’t happening on this server. NO biggie, client said he was getting rid of that server anyways 
The moral of the story:
If you’re willing to sacrifice applications and stability for security, go with BSD. However, with just a little bit of tweaking, you can get Linux as secure (or more) than BSD, AND have the applications that were designed for linux ON linux boxes. Seems right to me.
Either of these choices will beat a Windows server for security and stability reasons, anyone who’s got any experience with networks and administration knows this. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Windows is insecure from day 1. I mean, as soon as you get it setup, take ‘er to windowsupdate, and poof! It’s like you have to spend 2x the time updating than you do installing. Of course there are always people out there that’ll defend windows with their lives.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a windows hater, although I hate crappy code. I hate the fact that 99% of developers out there (for home products) develop for WINDOWS servers or WINDOWS pc’s. Why is that? What, do you NOT want a larger base? Do you NOT want your product to actually work in a real environment? Oy vey!
Anyways, time for this one is over with. Feel free to comment, just keep ‘em civil 
