Both FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are great OSs. BSD-religious will usually say the BSD is "more stable" than Linux, or that Linux people only do "hacks" instead of "good programming".
Frankly, I don't think this is true. Mostly it's jealousy for the popularity of Linux. The comment above that "if you are a hacker go with Debian GNU/linux. Are you a system administrator that depends on a consistent and stable system run with the *BSD crowd" is a perfect example of this.
Both OSs are plenty stable. Both OSs require quite a bit of mastery of system administration. The poster just has a skewed view since he's used to FreeBSD. But Linux has better support from the industry (hence your machine will have better support), and has grabbed more mindshare.
As a side note, you can easily install Debian if you have unix experience. If you don't have that much experience, you can install Progeny Debian (www.progeny.com), to have a system with the quality of Debian that is easy to install.
The sites pointed as "most reliable" by Netcraft on the link posted on the first post of this thread are all obscure sites that probably get few hits per day, or that are really only serving .jpgs (many sites in that list are porn sites). Windows 98 will serve a few jpgs a day fine with personal web server just as well.
I've seen Linux machines running for years without reboot. It's not a question if Linux is stable or reliable. It IS stable and it IS reliable. Now if an MCSE grabs a CD with RH 7 (it happens very often), installs it and gets cracked into, it's not really Linux's fault (you can argue it's RH's fault for releasing such buggy distro).
BTW, have the threading issues been resolved in latest versions of FreeBSD? AFAIK multithreaded apps had trouble running on FreeBSD because of it.
