Rubenerd

Despite being a heavy Wikipedia user, it's been a long time since I checked out the FreeBSD article (yes dad there's a Deutsch version too!)

Never being one to pass up the opportunity to advocate my favourite operating system, I thought I'd pass on a select few passages:

FreeBSD has been characterized as “the unknown giant among free operating systems.”

You can definitely say that again!

FreeBSD has been characterized as “the unknown giant among free operating systems.”

Oh har har.

FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust. Among all operating systems which can accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the free operating system listed most often in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime.

I'm not one of those people who determins the value of the systems by their uptime, but even I admit that's pretty good :).

As for it's similartieis with Linux and other Unix-like systems:

[FreeBSD] is not a clone of UNIX, but works like UNIX, with UNIX-compliant internals and system APIs.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree, whereas with Linux distributions, the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately, then packaged together in various ways by others.

Most software that runs on Linux can run on FreeBSD without the need for any compatibility layer. FreeBSD nonetheless also provides binary compatibility with several other Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. […] No noticeable performance penalty over native FreeBSD programs has been noted when running Linux binaries, and, in some cases, these may even perform more smoothly than on Linux.