How good is FreeBSD as a development platform?

Question

I know that lots of web hosting providers are offering FreeBSD, but how good is FreeBSD as a development platform?

Specifically, is Java 1.6 available in it? Is there s

Answer 1

Putting the actual issues with Java and such aside, the real question is what are you developing for.

If you are writing rich desktop applications, then you naturally want to develop on the platform that is most popular with your users -- and I'm pretty sure that can't be FreeBSD.

If you are developing web applications, then you want your development server to be as close as possible to your production hosting environment. If you are going to deploy on FreeBSD, then it might make sense to also run it locally, at least in a virtual machine. (Browser testing, of course, is a different issue.)

Do keep in mind that, while all development tools you can run on BSD are also available on Linux, the opposite is certainly not true, especially since Linux has gained more commercial traction.

All this being said, the best way is to see for yourself: try replicating your development environment, whatever that might be, on FreeBSD. If you succeed (and you're coming from Linux, heh), once you get coding you won't even care what OS you're on.