For years I have been a FreeBSD bigot. I love FreeBSD, the stability, performance, ease of use, and steady progression.

But…

Updates are kind of a chore, there is no such thing as true incremental updates, you either do patch updates against RELEASE, or you do world updates against STABLE. I am a STABLE kind of admin so my updates take quite a few man hours to do. The number of security updates required for FreeBSD is quite minimal (the target is small).

The Ubuntu Linux distribution does do things incrementally, you can update whenever you wish as by default everything is distributed as binaries. The downside is the constant updates that are in the pipeline and no easy way to figure out which update is relevant to what type of thing you are updating for. The update mailing lists are high speed, high volume, and I don’t have enough time in my day to keep up. The number of security updates required for any Linux distribution is very large (the target is huge).

And this has nothing to do with package maintenance…

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