Performance VS FreeBSD? and future of old OS X releases

[nixcamic]

I have an old Xserver running El Capitan and was gonna throw O3x on it to use on my network, but was wondering how performance compares to say FreeBSD and if it would be worth it to just reinstall the OS.

Also, I can't upgrade past El Capitan. I know 2.2.3 runs fine on Cap but I saw 2.3.0 release candidate only supports the latest two releases of OS X. Is that just because of its RC status or have older versions been dropped?

[Sharko]

When you say "reinstall the OS," do you mean ditch MacOS in favor of FreeBSD? If you're only using the XServe as a file storage appliance, then yes, I'd go with FreeBSD.

With regard to support for older versions, Mr Lundman typically only puts out release candidate versions for testing with the latest operating systems; when the testing is all complete he usually puts out a full suite of releases going back to cover quite a few MacOS versions.

[nixcamic]

When you say "reinstall the OS," do you mean ditch MacOS in favor of FreeBSD? If you're only using the XServe as a file storage appliance, then yes, I'd go with FreeBSD.

Yes, however the complicating factor is that it would be 32 bit freebsd vs 64 bit mac os since the server has 32 bit EFI but a 64 bit processor which doesnt work on most oses. I'm going to try to get Fedora running on it since its supposedly one of the few distros that provides a 32 bit bootloader on 64 bit. The other factor is that mac OS is a lot easier for other people besides me to administer. I guess I'll just have to try it and see.