On Topic? Looking for opinions...

The key here to me, is that you specified you are going to run "services", and that you are concerned with reliability because "your friends server isn't stable". FreeBSD, or any of the XBsd's, are definitely the choice over linux there, given those two statements. No, I'm not trying to start any wars - if someone disagrees with me, please back it up - as I will here. The strong point of FreeBSD or any of the variants (open, net, BSDI, etc.) are the tcp stack and the VM system. These are exactly the areas where Linux falls short. This isn't an opinion, it's a fact. The VM system in Linux has always been severely challenged, swapping when it shouldn't for example. why. The VM in BSD has been around for decades, as has it's networking code. Linux can't claim that. I prefer code that not only works well, but has been around for many many years. Why is this important you may ask? Well, because you want to run server based services like mail and web serving. Couple that with the fact you are using (comparatively, no denigration intended) a low powered machine to do it. If the thing is swapping when it shouldn't, you've just cut the nu*s off the machine and any hopes for acceptable performance. Linux does have it's strong points. It supports many more devices (brands, manufacturers, etc.) and it does so more quickly when new devices come out. However, this is due to the development paradigm. Just about anyone can throw together a driver, and get it included in some Linux distro. FreeBSD has a tight (closed) development team. So the plus of linux is - if you got some hot new scsi controller that just came out on the market yesterday, chances are it will work with Linux. Of course, some 12 year old kid may have written the driver, and he may not have thought to turn on something like oh... say DMA in his driver. But it will "work". FreeBSD on the other hand is MUCH slower to support new devices. But when it does, rock solid. There are a lot of other things to elucidate differences here, but I won't go into great length - but here's one other small point. How quickly does linux come out with new kernel releases. They suffer from "kernel of the week" syndrome. I frequently here some linux fen say "Oh, yeah, that problem is a bug (in linux), it's fixed in kernel version 2.4.3.4.1.0.9.2.3. Geeze. Nothing like letting the end users find all your bugs. Sounds like another more well known OS manufacturer. FreeBSD generally has one release per year. Imagine that. Code that works. No, FreeBSD is NOT bug free. But it's a better scenario in that regard. You also say you want to expose the S/O to something other than XP. Great. Put Gnome or KDE on the FreeBSD machine. No worries there, works just fine. I would beg to differ that FreeBSD is hard to install, even for a novice. But I will definitely ceed that the install isn't as user friendly as Linux. Linux is doing a great job of making the installation easy. However, the "tough" parts of installing freebsd are very definitely things you don't want to miss out on. You'll need to learn them eventually either way. Hummm what other big name OS tried so hard to make things easy that they hid too many things from the end user. And yes, I will admit I'm biased. I'm a FreeBSD zealot. But not because it's what all the other geeks are running, it's for sound technical reasons. Regards, Jay West