I was reading that macos x is based on freebsd 5 (it's now on version 6). how does bsd compare to linux? any advantages to speed or stability, support of hardware such as wireless device?

as for hardware support, it is my understanding that none of the BSDs (netbsd, openbsd, freebsd) have as much hardware support as linux...

as for speed, i believe there have been some benchmarks done which show freebsd beating linux on some MySQL database tests, but i don't remember exactly...

as for stability, i would definitely expect any of the BSDs to be a lot more stable than linux, considering the huge amount of development that linux gets, compared to xBSD...

i'm hoping someone could post links to some good info comparing the speed of linux vs. xbsd, as i'm interested in this too... not to switch or anything, just curiousity...

PS: yes, the mac os x kernel is based on freebsd 5 and mach 3.0...

One of the sticky threads in our very own *BSD forum has a link to BSD for Linux users (which is also the first hit in Google if you do a search for "Linux vs BSD").

Edit: you might like to read this (and some of the links on that page) about hardware and FreeBSD. FWIW, my Ralink-based wireless card worked fine with the driver in the kernel in FreeBSD 6.0.

I read this a while back and found it intereting. It is a scalability benchmark of 2.4.x Linux, 2.6.x Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. As for hardware support, I never found the BSDs to support as "much" hardware as linux supports, but the hardware that it DOES support, it has better support for due to more time and effort put into fine tuning of little aspects that goes into the BSDs and not quite as much with linux development. The BSD people like to reengineer alot of the stuff that goes into their systems and master it. This basically means that the stuff that is there isn't quite as up to date, and support for new hardware wont be released as soon because development is slower, but that you wont have near as many problems with buggyness as they are near neurotic about it. Also, NetBSD is famous for trying to get BSD to run on as many different architectures as possible... they have a long list going. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will support all the hardware that can be connected to computers of those architectures, but the OS its self will run on a massive range of processors including the acorn26, acorn32, algor, alpha, amd64, amiga, amigappc, arc, arm32, atari, bebox, cats, cesfic, cobalt, dreamcast, evbarm, evbmips, evbppc, evbsh3, evbsh5, ews4800mips, hp300, hp700, hpcarm, hpcmips, hpcsh, i386, ibmnws, iyonix, luna68k, mac68k, macppc, mipsco, mmeye, mvme68k, mvmeppc, netwinder, news68k, newsmips, next68k, ofppc, pc532, playstation2, pmax, pmppc, prep, sandpoint, sbmips, sgimips, sh3, sh5, shark, sparc, sparc64, sun2, sun3, vax, x68k and xen.

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