Leaving aside the technical reasons, FreeBSD “feels like home”. I’ve just purchased a refurbished X250 and plan to switch back to FreeBSD from Ubuntu as my daily driver for everything other than streaming media and gaming.
Which is odd, because I grew up with Linux in the 1990s, and only discovered FreeBSD in ~ 2014.
Arguably the Linux of 2022 is unrecognisable from the Linux of the 1990s due to the insane amount of software churn, whereas FreeBSD hasn’t changed that much. When the BSDs adopt something new, they try to make it fit in with the rest of the system and make sure it’s of a solid enough design that it doesn’t have to be replaced in a few years. And the rate of change is much slower, too.
On the other hand, in the (late) 1990s and 2000s running Linux or BSD on your desktop was more or less the same experience: loads of stuff wouldn’t work “because $X only supports Windows”.
Today things have expanded a little bit with “$X support Windows, macOS, and Linux”. Of course, lack of support for $X is often not FreeBSD’s fault, but I find it’s a good pragmatic reason to prefer Linux over any of the BSD systems, especially for daily desktop use. Not that I have a particularly great love for the “Linux ecosystem”, but “Just Works™” (most of the time) counts for a lot as I’m too old to be dealing with that kind of stuff.
Today things have expanded a little bit with “$X support Windows, macOS, and Linux”. Of course, lack of support for $X is often not FreeBSD’s fault, but I find it’s a good pragmatic reason to prefer Linux over any of the BSD systems, especially for daily desktop use.
I’d argue that it’s a good short-term reason, but pragmatically, supporting OSs outside of that group will result in a healthier ecosystem in the future.
Edited to add: my experience is that a lot of open source software that doesn’t work well on FreeBSD just needs a little help (bug reports, suggestions, testing) to get over the line.
Leaving aside the technical reasons, FreeBSD “feels like home”. I’ve just purchased a refurbished X250 and plan to switch back to FreeBSD from Ubuntu as my daily driver for everything other than streaming media and gaming.
Which is odd, because I grew up with Linux in the 1990s, and only discovered FreeBSD in ~ 2014.
Arguably the Linux of 2022 is unrecognisable from the Linux of the 1990s due to the insane amount of software churn, whereas FreeBSD hasn’t changed that much. When the BSDs adopt something new, they try to make it fit in with the rest of the system and make sure it’s of a solid enough design that it doesn’t have to be replaced in a few years. And the rate of change is much slower, too.
On the other hand, in the (late) 1990s and 2000s running Linux or BSD on your desktop was more or less the same experience: loads of stuff wouldn’t work “because $X only supports Windows”.
Today things have expanded a little bit with “$X support Windows, macOS, and Linux”. Of course, lack of support for $X is often not FreeBSD’s fault, but I find it’s a good pragmatic reason to prefer Linux over any of the BSD systems, especially for daily desktop use. Not that I have a particularly great love for the “Linux ecosystem”, but “Just Works™” (most of the time) counts for a lot as I’m too old to be dealing with that kind of stuff.
That’s why I switched back to Linux from (Net)BSD, too. Not enough time for ceaseless yak shaving and working around deficiencies.
I’d argue that it’s a good short-term reason, but pragmatically, supporting OSs outside of that group will result in a healthier ecosystem in the future.
Edited to add: my experience is that a lot of open source software that doesn’t work well on FreeBSD just needs a little help (bug reports, suggestions, testing) to get over the line.
I was expecting some actual technical reasons, but might have missed them? The things outlined are mainly just…opinions on features?
I just posted the somewhat related FreeBSD - a lesson in poor defaults , which is more technical.