Well... there are 2 answers to that for me.
First is simple & obvious: "
because it gets the job done", the power to serve is strong within this one.
But my personal reasons... go a bit deeper. To me, personally (!), FreeBSD is the
true spiritual successor to Sun Solaris. I am/was a certified Solaris administrator since the '90's and have been quite passionate about Solaris (and Unix in general) for quite a few years. At one time I even ran 3 local Solaris/x86 servers, 2 of them fully licensed for support because I believed in the company.
Well... we probably all know how
that ended. Thing is, Unix is a bit of a passion for me; I can truly get excited and motivated when I work on my console(s) to make my servers "do" something. Probably needless to say but FreeBSD gives me all the good stuff from Solaris (like ZFS, the professional design and approach) as well as giving me the same level of control, if not even (much)
more.
I mean... there's something special about having the ability to (almost) literally build your OS from the ground up (referring to
/usr/src) and fully customizing it to your needs. Sorry, no support for games nor HyperV, Unbound, wireless, Bluetooth, finger, FreeBSD update, bsdinstall or sendmail on my servers (though we obviously do keep the
games/nethack36-nox11 around).
Best of all... I use FreeBSD versions which my hosting provider doesn't even officially support yet for their VPS systems. I also don't really need them to keep my systems up to date. Oh right, speaking of which... it's pretty trivial (IMO) to build the ports yourself, store all the packages in your own local repository then feed those to your backup server(s)... compile once, use many. Source tree? I use NFS for that on a (private) vlan between my servers (it's also an extra layer of security because my backup server only has
ro access to said sourcetree export).
Right now I'm building v15 on my backup server and... I just love seeing how some things just never change. Why should they? I prefer reliability over "flashy gadget features", even though I really enjoyed Inspector Gadget as a kid
Yah, what's there not to like here?
