That was always the question: VHS or Betamax? Bluray or HD-DVD?

As someone who used both and switched back and forth in the last two decades, from a technical standpoint I would say:

What was the biggest disadvantage of Slackware over FreeBSD back in the 90s? The Linux kernel.
What is the biggest advantage of Slackware over FreeBSD today? The Linux kernel.

Back in the early days Linux was a more or less experimental operating system, popular in the hobbyist scene with tinkerer hardware. FreeBSD had a more corporate background (Yahoo, WindRiver, cd-rom.com et al) due to its direct UNIX heritage and was popular for serving Web and FTP sites.

That was reflected by the hardware support: Linux supported every proprietary CD-ROM and popular sound cards, FreeBSD OTOH had excellent SCSI and NIC support (all these drivers got ported over Linux later). In the filesystem department ext2 was optimized for speed (and lost data on crashes), while UFS/FFS focused on stability and integrity, and therefore was slow on el-cheapo IDE hard drives (with disabled write caches).

By the end of the 90s IBM, Red Hat and Google changed the world and poured billions on Linux, so it made a huge step forward while FreeBSD development continued at the same pace. Linux improved a lot, got ported to dozens of platforms and became the most versatile operating system in history. FreeBSD continued to thrive due to its license and successfully occupied a niche.

So where are we now? Due to pure man-power, financial and corporate support Linux is more than a decade ahead of FreeBSD in development. So the main interesting thing is now the license: If you can't use Linux due to the GPL, the next best thing is FreeBSD. If the Linux ecosystems breaks apart due to init replacement wars: FreeBSD is your plan B.

3 members found this post helpful.

FreeBSD 10.0 has been released.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/announce.html

It depends on what you wish to run. Some of this is an exercise to see which projects are of the "old guard," i.e., those that want open source to run in as many places as possible. So it kinda goes like this:

Start with your `make world` steps and get everything set up decently. Back it up. Leave the built source code there, in case you have to replace a program here or there.

Some programs will build from a base FreeBSD system. ntpd, smartmontools, and a few others will build from the base, and I think smartmontools might even provide an rc script. Nice! Give those programs bonus points and keep them close to heart for the extra effort!

Many programs want something GNU in there. Some configure scripts will ask for gettext, some will ask for GNU libiconv, libunistring, libsigsegv, so while building up the GNU stuff, get to them early to keep from rebuilding them later. For programs that overwrite BSD stuff, think about installing them elsewhere (--prefix=/somewhere-else) or with an added prefix (--program-prefix=g, for instance, to change sed to gsed). Get bash in there fairly quickly as well.

If you want the normal Slackware pkgtools in there, the scripts might take some work and modification. If nothing else, they refuse to work correctly with anything other than GNU ls.

Otherwise, the bottom part of the system is a judicious use of variables to see what is what. You might have to do set MAKE to "gmake" for many projects but not some others. BSD's M4 and awk implementations hold up fairly well, but there's something about GNU sed's behavior that can make a big difference when compiling GNU projects.

Also, I'm also looking to see what Clang will and will not build. It gets better with each release. That adds to the fun, even if it means failing and rebuilding using gcc sometimes. I'm doing that on Slackware right now. Cool stuff.

Along the way, you might adjust your make.conf or src.conf files (forget which) and have `make world` not build replaced items next time.

Last time I tried it (9.1), it's clear that the build process isn't being checked with a fresh gcc out of ports. Should you be curious as to how well a new gcc does on the base system, get ready to adjust some Makefiles and fix some code. gcc's diagnostics have improved quite a bit since 4.2.

Other pitfalls...some projects (like RPM) have something for FreeBSD, but it's like FreeBSD 4 or 5, and it causes more harm than good when getting it going. It was straight-up evil to build Mesa as well. Also, if you install the wrong things to /usr, mixed-up include files will make life harder, should you need to rebuild the world. I think that flex or bison burned me fairly well some years ago.

In other words, it's all good fun! It's educating and entertaining, and it will give you a great perspective on how each part of the open-source community is doing. It will also give you a refreshed appreciation for those who put ports and packages together and get things to work on alien systems.

2 members found this post helpful.

Clang will build just about everything except a handful of projects on Linux. I don't know if there is a comprehensive list yet though. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to draft a complete list?