Do you use BSD as a daily driver?
If so why did you choose this as your primary OS over MAC, Windows or Linux (let’s face it if you are using Solaris . . .ahem)?
FIRST: This is not meant to be seen as derogatory in any way.
I have run BSD (freebsd) in the past on servers and loved the ports tree back in the early 2000s as it was easier and better IMO than the Linux package systems back then. Since then, i’ve moved to Linux and am very satisfied with my choice.
That said, I’m curious as to what BSD does for you that other OSes don’t do as well. Also, I’m curious as to what sort of DE you prefer, and what sort of hardware you use.
I appreciate whatever detail you can provide and would love to hear what BSD does better than the alternatives.
Until recently, Linux’s packet filter has been pretty bad at scale. I’ve seen some incredibly ugly hacks to get around performance issues with it. For home desktop and laptop users , the differences really don’t matter except in usability but Linux has been pretty bad on that front, too. Small business firewalls and up stand to benefit from *BSD’s better handling in the network stack.
Until ZFS is included in the mainline Linux kernel, it’s always going to be a second-class citizen on Linux. OpenZFS is a huge improvement over it’s previous state, but dkms workaround are terible and unreliable, especially when you start stacking them on top of each other.
An honorable mention here goes to the ports system. Some Linux distros use something akin to ports, and Mac has Brew which is also pretty close. I consider software to be source code, and think of binary packaging as a convenience for end user, not the primary way software should be handled. Again, desktop and laptop users won’t really see the benefits of it, but for people building their own stacks on top of these systems, the flexibility is useful. Honorable mention only because I think there have been some improvements in source-based software management, but every one of them began with ports as the inspiration.
