FreeNAS or CentOS for server

They may be needing some amount of customization. FreeNAS is a wonderful appliance OS that can meet a vast number of use cases, but the moment you need it to step out of its comfort zone, it falls flat on its face. The FreeNAS team is very against customization. Which I can kinda get behind, I guess. They are supplying an appliance OS, rather than a general purpose OS.

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Jails exist and can run anything that will run in a jail. Which is most server stuff?

the main reasons one may want to do this would be

  • to install an application on top of CentOS that is not supported on FreeBSD (e.g., VMware Workstation and the like)
  • in general to run desktop applications on the machine
  • because they run CentOS (or other linux) elsewhere and can maintain a familiar platform that shares patches, bug tracking, etc.
  • maybe better (or any) hardware support for video encoders or capture cards etc.
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