Freebsd love, well love and hate all in one, pain in ass to get things going but once you do elation kicks in.
but i could best descibe it like this
windows ....works but everyone knows you are using it and everything you do is tracked logged spyed stolen and hijacked.
linnux ....works for a few weeks....updates break things ..every distro moves things, cant find anything without distro specific help...a muddled mess
freebsd ...nothing works but over time you can make it work, with a manual that easy to follow and a community thats helps you. And when your IQ kicks in and you copy and save your rc.conf bootloader.conf etc then next install gets easier and easier.
PLUS you can run a lean system on old crap you get given that no one else would use......recycling woooot!
oh.......and 666
gotta love the devil
Pretty much the same reasons here. Although besides a few issues (That I know is due to some weird quirks with the hardware I'm using), I've not struggled to get started.
I've just finished up with a company that went tits up a few months ago. I inherited their IT hardware, so I've a few toys to play with. It was a small company, but I was the IT/Electrical/Technical guru. Everything was virtualised on an old HP XW6600 (20GB ECC RAM and two Quad Core Xeons, and a simple Mirrored RAID array via a P400 card). It was virtualised via Windows Server 2012, having CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows2012, and FreeBSD Virtual Machines. All with their own purposes - but the Linux's kept throwing up issues for one reason or another. FreeBSD - it just kept going and going and going and going and go.... you get the point. Windows? Well, I had no complaints either.
I'm not a professional IT administrator - I'm an Electronics and Electrical Engineer to trade who jumped ship when the last coal power Station in the country closed. But I've always been a geek of sorts with IT. I've tried numerous times over the last few years to get to proper grips with Linux - but if you spend any time away from it, no matter how small, it's hard to keep up - it's too much of a moving target, and I'm too slow (or too busy to invest the needed time and energy) to keep up to date with it. FreeBSD? My impression from the online guide and forums is it's more organised, and slower to change - I can spent time to properly learn how to use it without being concerned of being too out of date next time I use it. I like the fact that it's the entire O/S that is FreeBSD, and not thrown together by different tools from GNU to make the OS.
I started, two weeks ago when I got some time off, to sit with a notepad and really try to learn that OS. Now at home I have my web server up and running, a mail server (still waiting on the ISP to sort out my PTR record), a file server, and my databases up and running in Jails, isolated by vLANs, behind a nice SMB router and enterprise switch, I have ZFS (without scrubbing) and snapshots automatically backing up certian mount points nightly on an external Hard Drive. And I understand now how to administer all of this - there are parts where I've needed to come to the forum to clarify something, but on the whole the quality of the guide and the fact it's not as fast a moving target makes me confident that I'll not be pulling my hair out when it comes to update. I simply couldn't do this with Linux - the manuals don't exist, and where they do, they are out of date or fragmented.
Oh, and btw, I have all the above on a single Via Eden 1GHz CPU with only 2GB of RAM. Its a modified Dell FX130 - with a couple of USB drives. It's not going to break any speed records, but it's quiet and doest the job with (believe it or not), next to no CPU utilisation.
Because of work needs (and the fact I have had to invest so much time in getting it to run as cleanly and as leanly as I can), I have Windows on the laptop. It's a lenovo with a docking station and what not - the chances of FreeBSD or Linux/GNU meeting my current needs are slim to none. But for serving, FreeBSD has been gold.
Anyway, enough about all that. What do I like about FreeBSD?
Easy to find out how to do something.
Helpful forum, from contributers who appear, so far at least, to actually "know" the O/S (not just script jockies that found out how to do the task last week)
Jails
Easy config of networks
Not a fast moving target to learn - it's sane!
Has such low demands of hardware it could probably run on an empty crisp packet - it actually runs the FX130 supporting all it's hardware! (WTF? it's a thin client from over a decade ago with an obscure CPU - yet it supports the cryto acceleration of that CPU!!!)
Supports my UPS.
It behaves itself for long long periods of time.
Things I am worried about:
That it may fade into obscurity and become useless by lack of use and relavence. I hope the above reasons keep it going, but the world - in many occupations, even deemed professional - is become more infatuated with "shiny shiny bling" (I'm a grumpy old man at heart).
I will need to become a billionaire I guess so I can support FreeBSD with the money required to make this sort of code development support a reality.
I have a game plan, and if I ever make it big, I'd throw serious dosh at FreeBSD too. It's too good to disapear.