Hi all

I have a question regarding whats better FreeBSD or RedHat? Right now I am running FC3 but I know that companies dont usually implement Fedora because its more for home use I guess. But they do implement Redhat and FreeBSD, so which one do you think is better?

For what purposes? Both OSes are good, so your choice will depend on your experience with both of them as well as what you intend to do.

I want to be able to have the system work as client/server and not having it to crash and have an easy way of administrating it and not have to worry too much about bugs or dependancies or if there is a problem have a logical way of fixing it, and have the latest and greatest applications like compatibility of watching movies, listening to music, running webserver, burning cd/dvd, having good fonts for web browsing, tight security, up to date packages, streaming videos from web, working plugins, and possibly games... I guess thats the ideal system.

Woah... You're definately more suited to RedHat.
Nothing in your listing is anything FreeBSD even considers preloading. In BSD, it is your responsibility to install anything beyond the bare necessities.
Realize: Yes, very high-end companies choose both operating systems, but for different reasons. FreeBSD is generally chosen BECAUSE it has hardly any preloaded features. It's very powerful, but is aimed towards modders who like to build their systems themselves from the ground up. It's not aimed towards and not for the average desktop user, but for the type of people who would rather build their own servers and save money by not installing the monitor. Portage, the BSD package managing system (if I'm correct) is a wonderful tool, but never really has the latest packages. Also, and perhaps most importantly, there are virtually no games for BSD (other than simple strategy players). BSD is not Linux, it uses a completely different kernel, is distributed under a completely different license, and cannot run your complex Linux-only apps (although there is a very well-developed system for running simpler Linux binaries). Also, because it is completely free (hence the title), it cannot legally contain proprietary commercial audio and video codecs -- hence no internet-retrieved music (for the most part) and no movies.

IN addition to what peter said, Freebsd has lots of problems of supporting hardwars, which can be easy configured with redhat or suse or even major linux distributions

Portage is for Gentoo Linux. FreeBSD has several packaging tools, ports being one of the most common. Ports does have the latest and greatest packages. You can configure your system to use these if you wish, but if you have installed FreeBSD on a server, its not necessarry to have the latest and greatest.

Multimedia packages can easily be installed via ports (usually the process is even easier than trying to get multimedia working on some linux distros). Packages like Xine, libdvdcss, win32 codecs etc are all available in the ports collection.


The best way to find out which is best is probably to try them both and then stick with the one that you think suites your needs.

Now I know it hasn't been around that long (relatively) and is still in a early version (1.0) right now, but if you want a BSD system to do the sorts of things you want- server/client, watch movies etc- PC-BSD may be worth a look. It's based on FreeBSD, but it's got a desktop environment (KDE) preinstalled, and it's own package manager style of thing in addition to ports etc. So if you did want to escape having to install a mass of software you wanted, this might be a good choice too, if you're looking at a BSD vs. RH.

As for the actual usefulness of PC-BSD on a production system, I'm afraid I cannot comment, having only used it for a short time (and installed on a VM to boot...), but if you're still trying to decide what OS(es) to install, I guess you probably have little to loose by experimenting, unless time is tight.

Have fun ; )

What about BSD running under Apple? Isnt it the same FreeBSD or not?

You can install FreeBSD on Apple's PPC and PPC64 hardware, but Mac OS X is not the same as FreeBSD. Mac OS X uses Darwin (a derivitive of the Mach microkernel) as its base. Much of the userland is based off of FreeBSD, but they're not the same OS. There was a thread about this some time ago in the Ohter *nix forum which you might want to look at.