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Comment by olavgg | Hacker News Reader

Actually, FreeBSD is a great platform to learn about Linux. The more you learn about FreeBSD, the more will you understand Linux.

The only time I will advice not spending time on FreeBSD, is when you have to deal with Java.

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Absolutely agree.

A single year of FreeBSD has taught me more than 10 years of Linux about UNIX and by extension made me more proficient with both systems.

Have you tried lately? Java used to be a big issue on FreeBSD, but that hasn't been the case in several years. Now it works as well as any other platform.

What problems did you have with Java on FreeBSD?

I've done Java, Scala, and Clojure development on FreeBSD and had no problems whatsoever.

The issue was that in the past JDK (offered by Sun and Oracle) had no binaries available for FreeBSD (I believe the source was available but was not the same that Sun JDK was built from). If you wanted to run it, you would have to download the Linux version and run it in compatibility mode.

Later FreeBSD get some kind of deal with Sun to provide native Sun JDK for FreeBSD and made them available through http://www.freebsd.org (you can check web archive to see older versions).

Nowadays starting since JDK 7, OpenJDK supposed to be fully compatible with OracleJDK, so it should no longer be a problem anymore.

What issues do you have with Java on FreeBSD? I only just got FreeBSD running on my dev machine, but I've been able to work on (build/run) my Scala projects easily enough.

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