What are some of the major pro/con of FreeBSD vs GNU Linux vs OpenSolaris?

Question

What are some of the major pro/con of FreeBSD vs GNU Linux vs OpenSolaris?

Which is the best operating system to program/develop against?

Answer 1

The "best one" is what platform your prospective clients are running, what the market supports, which ultimately means where the money is....

Now, if you write a POSIX compliant application then porting it to either of these OS's should be trivial (including OSX)

You can also separate out the platform agnostic code so that the presentation layer is separate from the business layer to further ease portability and give the application a native look on the platform it is running.

Answer 2

Here is a very good (albeit a bit outdated) article about FreeBSD vs Linux vs Windows (sorry, no OpenSolaris). It's worth reading. I've been a fan of FreeBSD for over 15 years, after learning about it from admins that were running an ISP I worked at. FreeBSD is legendary for its stability, has lots of documentation, huge ports collection, and it even allows running Linux binaries. I built three servers for my latest project using FreeBSD and couldn't be happier.

Answer 3

Short answer: FreeBSD ;-) - better documentation, more stable. On the downside, less consumer hardware support compared to GNU/Linux.

When you ask which is best to develop for, it's unclear if you mean writing kernel modules or end-user GUI apps, or something in between.

Unless your writing low-level stuff, there's no difference between them, at least for FreeBSD - GNU/Linux. Languages, toolkits, IDEs, etc. are available for both.