MUCH Better security record
Why?
linux: 19 security vulns in the 2.6.11 kernel since April 6, 2005
FreeBSD: 10 Security vulns in the entire 5.4-RELEASE since April 14, 2005 (3 in just the kernel)
OpenBSD: 6 security vulns in the entire 3.6-RELEASE since April 1, 2005 (
More stable
why?
This is purely anecdotal, but what the hell:
* BSD's owns virtualy
all of the longest uptimes at netcraft
* Your linux box has crashed
at least one more time than my BSD box has in the past month :p
Faster TCP stack
Why?
FreeBSD has consistently been shown to outperform linux under high networking loads. linux has improved in this area drastically with the advent of the 2.6 kernel
Better integrated firewalls (pf/ipfw2)
Why?
They are every bit as functional, and perform better then ipchains. The syntax of both ipfw2 and pf syntax is MUCH easier to learn than iptables. I've seen my share of iptables scripts..they are scary...I could impliment them in half the lines with ipfw2.
Slightly better file System:
UFS2
supports MUCH larger file sizes and volumes over any linux filesystem.
Also, the BSD's have featured fault tolerant file systems (resitant to power failures/hard resets) many years before linux did.