I know the other thread was brought up (and somewhat beaten to death), but I didn't throw my hat in the ring there as someone who is relatively inexperienced with the BSDs (which was the original focus of that thread, though it veered off topic). Certainly I'm not qualified to criticize the technical direction of the project, I would say that. I have some thoughts as a recent convert to FreeBSD on all of my devices (laptop/desktop) if anyone is interested, though.
I'd been using Slackware (as well as some other distros, on and off) since the late 90's. Systemd didn't have anything (at all) to do with why I switched, considering there is guaranteed to be a supported Slackware without systemd until - at least, knowing Pat maybe longer - 2020. Let me break down my reasons for switching:
1. Linux is becoming more and more bloated as time goes by, in spite of dropping support for old hardware that I still use (there are distros that use older kernels to counteract this, but I wouldn't connect one to the Internet). A real use case example of bloat: I can run several emulators (
emulators/dolphin-emu,
emulators/pcsxr) with no slowdown on my older Core 2 Quad PC with a GTX 550 Ti and
x11/nvidia-driver on FreeBSD. I can't do this on Linux any longer. I have tried minimalist Linux distros, but can't achieve that with a modern one. FreeBSD is much more efficient these days, just in my experience. Granted, that's not my main desktop, but it isn't obsolete hardware either. Also, FreeBSD still runs on my obsolete hardware (PII/PIII era) while a newer Linux kernel doesn't.
2. Btrfs is just not ready as a next generation file system, but ZFS on Linux lags far behind ZFS on FreeBSD. I swore by LVM with XFS for many years, but the advantages of next gen file systems have made it less than ideal for me (especially in preventing bit rot) these days.
3. FreeBSD hardware support is very good now. I get better performance with my desktop NVIDIA cards, plus my sound cards and onboard Intel all work with my recent (say 2010 or newer) motherboard and sound card purchases. Sound support used to be one of the things that stopped me from switching, this isn't the case anymore, and it hasn't been for awhile.
4. FreeBSD still uses
OSS, which I was very annoyed to lose in Slackware.
5. FreeBSD still has (in my opinion) a more complete and properly supported ports system than any modern Linux distro (Gentoo, Void, etc.)
6. FreeBSD has clear leadership and direction, you don't see statements like this -
http://ostatic.com/blog/linus-systemd-indifference-pclos-review-and-rebecca#buzz
I am personally hesitant to donate to and support (via forums, bug reports, etc.) projects when I don't see a clear road map for the future. As much as I think Pat Volkerding knows what
should happen with Linux, he is just the BDFL of Slackware and can't control decisions made by Linus and Red Hat.
Also, one other thought I would put out there: I don't see why people are so apt to assume FreeBSD will make the same mistakes that were made with systemd when/if a new init system is implemented. To give an example,
DEVD has been introduced in place of
HAL and is excellent (rather than being another
HAL); after watching Jordan's presentation on YouTube, I feel like he is being misrepresented a bit. If he had said "We're bringing the greatness of systemd to FreeBSD!", then I'd be worried, but he didn't say anything like that at all. As I understood it, the hope is to please the embedded device makers (and supporters of FreeBSD) taking advantage of lessons learned from
launchd and still adhering to the UNIX philosophy (with the Lego analogy being my source for that).
In short, I think FreeBSD is becoming more popular, but systemd has little to do with it.