FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms. A large community has continually developed it for more than thirty years. Its advanced networking, security, and storage features have made FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.
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IBM AIX
Score 9.3 out of 10
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IBM AIX (for Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a Unix operating system, developed, offered and supported by IBM.
FreeBSD is the closest to a UNIX style operating system. This has been extensively used by vendors in the field of routing, switch and security as their base operating system. This speaks for itself being a reliable, scalable and secure operating system.
IBM AIX is a very powerful and extremely stable operating environment. It is well suited for applications that are business critical and cannot tolerate outages. It is best used to address large enterprise level application needs where stability and scalability are of paramount importance. IBM AIX is less useful for small enterprises.
AIX is robust, helps the systems administrator, is built to prevent easily made mistakes. If you are used to other variants of Unix (in particularly Linux) there is no steep learning curve to get started with AIX. You need to learn the intricacies of the operating system, but that is true for any new operating system. AIX has built-in tools for almost anything you want and has the AIX Toolbox (on the web) for tools that are not included with AIX by default, but can be installed. Installation of AIX is modular, you can select with components and features you want to have installed. Installation of additional components (and usually also removal of installed components) is easy and straight-forward.
FreeBSD was the only operating system out of many I tried to install easily on older hardware and to run in a very performant way. For example, I had a lot of trouble trying to get Ubuntu to install on older hardware and when it did, it was too slow to use. FreeBSD installed quite easily and even after installing a desktop such as XFCE - it still run surprisingly fast. I was very impressed with it's performance, which it seems is a goal of the FreeBSD project.
Compared to other Unix-like operating systems, IBM AIX is the one with a solid roadmap into the future and is likely to stay around for a long time (it is over 30 years old and still being updated with new features and components all the time). Compared to many Linux variants, the AIX operating system is more robust, easier to manage and well-supported by its vendor.
