I'll repeat what I always say. FreeBSD is a professional operating system for professionals and serious amateurs. Too many people come in here looking for an alternative to some other OS and want it to work the same or similar and easier. If that's their goal, they came here for all the wrong reasons unless they are a professional looking for a professional operating system. In which case, you can have everything you want in an OS.
Personally, I feel kind of forced to disagree on that. There's nothing like 'professional OS for professionals' stated on the system's Main Page, nor in the Handbook, nor in the Forums.
I think you're the only one who keeps assessing that, hence this should be recognized as a personal point of view.
You could say instead that FreeBSD, being a solid professional system, is one of the best choices for professional and that would be correct.
I'm not a professional, I'm a common user, what I do in life has nothing to share with informatics and computers.
Although it's been years since I first tried FreeBSD, I signed up in that forum only recently. Why?
The handbook and the answered threads on the forums provided any info I needed in order to solve any doubt and work out any kind of problem.
This won't prevent me from asking something in future, if I won't be able to solve the problem by myself, and (provided that it won't be a stupid question) you, as a professional, will probably be able to teach me something, if you'll be that kind to answer.
Anyway, now I find myself really comfortable with FreeBSD, I love it and use it as my only OS on my desktop and on a old laptop. When I am with my sister's Mac, I use it as If it were BSD, with xorg+xfce+Darwin's macports instead quartz+aqua+apple's apps.
What's more, some friends of mine (not professionals) who used to run Linux, became interested in FreeBSD, after having seen on my pc, and ended up being very satisfied after they gave it a try.
On one hand I recon FreeBSD is not for beginners, whereas it ain't surely as user-friendly as Win/OS X/Debian-Mint-Ubuntu-Elementary
It's true as well that in order to avoid wasting time at the beginning, basical experience with command line and Unix-like systems is a precious advantage.
However on the other hand, if FreeBSD were that difficult to be professional-only, then Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, Suse, Fedora, CentOS, Manjaro, and many other Linux-Distros, as well as PC-BSD, MidnightBSD, DragonflyBSD, not forgetting Solaris' derivatives, should be all considered 'professional-only', since, for instance, I had harder times with Slack than with FreeBSD.
How much does it take to learn how to install Arch correctly and make it bootable with UEFI? Less than FreeBSD perhaps? Don't think so
Are all those OSes used just by professionals?
Before starting using Linux I used to run MS-DOS and, later on,windows Me as a child. Were those less 'professional'? For me not. I didn't have 'professional' parents to help,they didn't even know what a computer was, still I used it, I was given a possibility to learn, I had a lot of fun, and made my computer work
Then I decided to switch to Linux and installed Corel. Wasn't back then Linux too professional for a newbie? Has this prevented any DOS/Windows user from installing it during 00's?
And now that Corel and Red Hat do not exist any longer, do you expect me to use Ubuntu/Mint just because I'm no professional? I think most of people who used Linux for quite some time, if forced to deal with Ubuntu, would like to drop it off for something less easy, but hell, all the way better (my opinion).
Now I use FreeDOS for gaming and for running legacy software I like. I prefer it over dosbox and virtualbox. Isn't that too professional for you?
I think that FreeBSD is a perfect choice for everybody who does not expect things to be pre-packaged.
If I were called up to answer to 'which professional system is supposed to be for professionals only', I would speak of Windows Server with power shell as interface, or IBM's AIX, maybe OpenBSD but definitely not FreeBSD.
In my opinion that perspective of yours ('few but good') if shared by all developers Deamons and moderators, would cut off half of the FreeBSD community,, and hold back FreeBSD from spreading wider.
However that perspective might not be shared by everyone, and, therefore, there's no point in claiming it to be sacred truth
It's not different from the perspective of a veteran CS-GO player who flames newbies, without earning anything from that.
Curiosity, will to listen and to learn should be always appreciated. You're not obliged to read thoroughly threads you consider 'not professional', neither you have to feel forced to answer them
