What Do You Love Most About FreeBSD?
It's not one thing, it is a cost-benefit-pro-con tradeoff. I have a long history of using computers, from MVS, RSX-11, VM CP/CMS, VMS, both Berkeley and AT&T Unix on minicomputers, SunOS, NeXTStep, and who knows what else. I started using Linux at home in 1994 or 1995, somewhere around 0.99.13, when the only distributions were stacks of floppies. There is still a (trivial) line of code I wrote in the Linux kernel. Then at work I used a lot of HP-UX and AIX. At work, I deal with zillions of Linux machines, but fortunately I don't have to administer them, just log in and program on them.
For a while, I used OpenBSD at home. Today, the only OS that I seriously install at home and administer is FreeBSD (the other operating systems come free with a machine, and are things like Android or MacOS). Exception: The three Raspberry Pi run Raspbian Linux; I tried FreeBSD, but ran into too many road blocks (mostly minor but all annoying).
Why do I chose FreeBSD for my home machine? The main reason is that it is clean, well-organized, and done by people with a professional mindset of quality. Note that I only use it as a server, not as a desktop (where a lot of the cruft, like "drm-next" comes in). Honestly, OpenBSD is even better in this regard, as Theo and his friends do an even better job of reviewing everything, cleaning it up, and removing everything that's not strictly necessary. But then, OpenBSD is lacking one particularly important feature, namely ZFS. Since I know a little bit about storage, I insist on RAID, and a high-quality file system: the rest of the machine can go up in smoke as far as I'm concerned, but I want my data to be safe. ZFS with checksums and integrated RAID is the best available option at the FOSS hobbyist level (if I wanted to spent many $10K on a file system, there would be better commercial options, but for that money I'd rather buy musical instruments).
Little things which are really nice to have, and which prevent me from getting pissed off at FreeBSD, include things like mostly good documentation, a clean package system, a good and easy-to-use upgrade mechanism, and a forum that can be used for support with mostly friendly people. The absence of complete a**holes (of the caliber of Linus or Lennard), but on a day-to-day basis they don't annoy me much. I know some of the *BSD old-timers a little bit (Kirk, Eric, Sam), and they are all very friendly (at least when sober; when drunk they can be overwhelming). The FreeBSD code of conduct also helps, to keep people interacting in a friendly fashion.
The downsides of FreeBSD are hinted at above: not as minimalist and clean as OpenBSD; performance is not as high as a hand tuned Linux system (but performance is not my issue); much less hardware support (but my hardware happens to work, with the exception of wireless cards, but I gave up trying those), and no commercial support of the high-end caliber (which I probably wouldn't buy for home, but demonstrates that it can be supported). Some everyday things (like getting LetsEncrypt certificates, and many other examples) are a little harder than on Linux, because 99% of the documentation and help out there is written for Linux, but so far I've got everything worked out with a little extra effort.
The community support and the spot on documentation ..
Agree.
After an upgrade I found that there were several picture viewers installed as a dependency from the desktop, each with it's own bulk of dependencies. ...
That kind of dependency hell is exactly what killed Linux for me. And being root-kitted.
But does Linux really do any job better?
Yes, there are lots of jobs that Linux does much better than FreeBSD. Proof is in the pudding. For example, look at the new Summit computer at Oak Ridge, the fastest compute cluster in the world. It runs Red Hat Linux. No, it does not run AIX or zOS, even though it was built by IBM. The people at Oak Ridge (and the other national labs) are very very smart, and evaluated what OS to pick, and they clearly rejected Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, and Minix. They have reasons, very good reasons. Matter-of-fact, 100% of the 500 fastest computers in the world run Linux (every single on). If you look at the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Google, the big banks: the overwhelming majority of their systems run Linux (with some Windows thrown in at commercial sites); the only major FreeBSD exceptions are NetFlix (the video distribution company), NetApp (the NAS storage server company), and Jupiter (which makes high-end routers), but together that's perhaps 1% of the market.
One job Linux does particularly well: being stable enough to be sold for profit and commercially supported. The fact that RedHat has grown to a very large company by cleaning up, selling and supporting a free OS speaks volumes about how good Linux can be. But that doesn't matter to me: my home system is not a big bank, not a big Internet company, nor do I want or need commercial support. I want an OS that I can and enjoy supporting myself.
The downfall will occur if FreeBSD should ever be more concerned with what others think rather than the science of computing.
What FreeBSD does today has nothing to do with computer science. The progress of FreeBSD is engineering, not science. When was the last time you saw a scientific publication about some improvement in *BSD? I think it might have been Kirk's paper on Soft Updates, but that was nearly 20 years ago.
Current Code of Conduct
Agree.
I used to like it because of this (picture of good-looking woman in tight-fitting beastie costume compared to badly dressed and ugly Linux geeks omitted)
That is indeed a good argument, unfortunately only for straight male and LGBT female computer users. But since I do self-identify as a male hetero chauvinist horny pig, I wouldn't mind if you shared the ladies' phone number. I'd like to meet her and check out whether she is silicon or real ...
but ever since FreeBSD became VirginOS...
In the office, when the annual "property control audit and inventory" comes around, I tell them the following joke: For religious reasons, I tried a vow of chastity once. It wasn't much fun. So now I have taken a vow of poverty instead, and no longer own any computing equipment that needs to be inventoried. They typically get upset at me.
OK, enough dirty jokes.
... is de Raadt and his "I am better than you" complex.
... spoilt narcissistic leaders like thoseo ften tend to attract proud aspergers fanboys which develop a religous cult for their OS leader and represent a true plague for OSS communities nowadays;...
All true. But the average *user* of Linux or OpenBSD (not developer or community member, but the person who just installs and runs it, perhaps with a support contract from a company like RedHat) does not go to the forums or mailing lists. He doesn't care whether Linus uses 4-letter words, or whether Theo is abusive if someone challenges his superiority, or whether Lennart is a fool with delusions. He simply cares that the product he downloaded or bought works well. And Linux does work well for many people. We should not over-emphasize the effect of a few nutcases on the business of computing.