lisux

Delight0092
Are you listening SESI!

Well I don't think this is the best way to talk to somebody.
SESI is not blind but they can't go against the whole industry.
At some point Linux beat FreeBSD and won the popularity battle.
It is a pity because all of us suffer the lack of a centralized and coordinated development in the Linux world.
It is a real problem for any industry to depend on a system ecosystem like the linux one.
Well more or less all studios adopted RedHat as the facto standard.
I still think FreeBSD is much better crafted system then Fedora or CentOS, which what studios really use.
What I am saying is that in the same way SESI make a remarkable movement soem years ago supproting Linux as a growing platform, nowdays I think the professional UNIX should FreeBSD rather than Linux.
By professional I just mean used for production work.
Would be great if SESI make this step and try to convince other palyers in this industry to make the move.
The other UNIX used in our industry is MacOS, and definitely FreeBSD is closer to Darwin than to GNU/Linux, so I think it is much better for all software developers to mainly work for BSD platforms.

I meant the are you listening SESI! To be enthusiastic rather than demanding, And in reply to the one benchmark not being enough to switch, I meant it in the sense that if I can get graphics working nicely with all of the other things BSD has it would be an incentive, FreeBSD is secure, Uniform, very fast and most of it's features are low level, They don't focus on fancy UI's or appstores.

Alanw

Delight0092
I read an article, and it says that Linux binaries run faster on FreeBSD, well at least this one did, it was an OpenGL bench mark. I think that's an incentive to switch, I'll be buying a Nvidia soon enough. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_games_bsd [phoronix.com] << Article, http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26204 [forums.freebsd.org] << Forum post discussing it.

Honestly, I would not use this benchmark as the sole basis for your decision. There are simply too many differences between the systems being compared. (Ubuntu running Unity Vs. PC-BSD running KDE) Even Linux distributions themselves can vary more than this particular benchmark when it comes to 3d graphics performance.

For example. http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-linux-distro-for-3d-performance.html [jeffhoogland.blogspot.com]

If you simply like BSD, and know BSD well then I don't blame you for wanting to use it though.

If you end up using Linux, I'd recommend Gentoo, Funtoo, or even Sabayon. All of them can use, or do use portage, which is very similar to the BSD style ports system for package management. Gentoo is also a very hands-on distro that you can customize until your hearts content. (including the use of clang to build a majority of the system if you want)

Good luck in whatever you decide. I'm still interested to hear if you get BSD + Nvidia combination working with Houdini as well

Although I appreciate the idea of getting a lot more control of my Distro and ultimately being free, I'm simply not willing to dedicate the time required to achieve it, My only options seem to be: CENTOS/RHEL/FEDORA or FreeBSD + Nvidia and a slightly wacky Houdini install. I'm very fond of what the FreeBSD fellows are doing with Jails, and as a server FreeBSD is just perfect, it will only get great as a desktop as it starts to be used as a desktop, PC-BSD is also good for it because it makes learning it so much easier.