Debian vs. FreeBSD

I was having a conversation with some friends (most of whom have had the sysadmin position which I pioneered back at UC Berkeley Residential Computing) and someone asked the age old “Debian or FreeBSD” question. I typed up a response and thought it was interesting enough to post here.

Fundamentally, Debian’s package management system uber alles. It’s telling that RedHat’s up2date, OSX’s Fink, and several other tools out there use the Debian package system. My biggest complaint with x86 Linux Debian is that they don’t do rolling releases of the individual packages, so you get a snapshot of software that was current when your distribution was released. They keep security patches very much up to date, but you don’t get new features by default. But with Debian it’s easy to grab the newer releases, compile them against the old system libraries, and apt-get makes it trivial to distribute them to all of your machines that you run. Mark is the master at running custom Debian repositories and I bow down to his skills. Debian updates can be completely automated and take administration overhead for a basic system down to 0.

FreeBSD’s kernel is about the most mature out there; lacking some of the “cutting edge” features that Linux has). It packs a huge amount into the base operating system, and there are complex dependancies therein. This makes patching for regular security updates somewhat of a pain in the ass because the isolated “patches” they provide can sometimes not work depending on the exact day which you last cvsup’d and built your system. This means that you regularly (at least once a month) have to do a full cvsup/buildworld/installworld/reboot. Basically, There’s a lot more rebooting in FreeBSD than there is in Debian. The FreeBSD ports system, while having more current releases than Debian’s stable distribution, is a pain to maintain and requires constant care and feeding. Again, if you get too far out of date it can fail in strange and curious ways.

I used to have a policy that I ran FreeBSD on my servers and Linux on my desktop machines. These days, time and usability is more important to me than religion. Also, I’m way past getting excitement out of “watching code compile”, so the fact that it takes 12 hours or more to do an upgrade on my P90 firewall at home has convinced me to switch it to Debian the next chance I get (considering I was just building a fence IN THE DARK, I doubt I’ll get a chance to switch it soon…)

I’ve heard rumors of a NetBSD kerneled Debian distribution, now that would seriously rock.