How's the UX for jails these days? I remember trying to use it barebones and also some of the wrappers.

That's similar to me, I started using FreeNAS back in the 9.x days.

At the time the FreeNAS documentation recommend installing to a usb drive. This proved unreliable, but dedicating a drive to it was silly given it couldn't be used for anything else. I had all the things I needed but I wanted to peel back the layers and this seemed like a good excuse

So I threw in a drive and installed freebsd 10 and spent a few days familiarising myself with everything, learned how to configure samba myself, learned how to setup jails with iocage (the old shell version), and finally imported my pool.

Years later very little has changed.

Have you looked at zVault at all?

https://zvault.io/

They added binary packages.

The deb and rpm files are not from the application either. Someone outside the application took the application and built the deb/rpm for the distro. FreeBSD just calls their packages "ports", but the concept is otherwise the same, just download the package. FreeBSD is better that most distros as is works to rebuild some middle library yourself with non-default options and then have a leaf application binary depend on it (assuming of course that they are compatible, if your non-default option breaks the application it won't work)

According to repology.org, FreeBSD is the 4th largest package repository in the open-source world.

Which type of applications? What I have found to be finicky is the desktop environments, however BSDs are pretty much tuned for web servers/applications. Bastille is designed for deploying web applications in jails securely and built on top of FreeBSD which is a pretty good default OS that gets out of your way already.

Normally you don't release an app for BSD specifically unless you want to offer a port. In which case software is usually built and if you need containerization you can put it in a jail.

It seems you would do well to install a FreeBSD vm/usb and give it a run. Their documentation is pretty good and their forums are helpful.

All the utilities are not GNU, but BSD, so there are differences. But typically not a problem, as long as you move inside POSIX. Most GNU utilities (all?) can be installed if you prefer them. For example, make is typically gmake, and you really need it. I haven't used BSD for the last 10 years but used it from 1999 to 2015. I had never major issues.

> Having never used anything beyond Linux, Windows and Mac, what would be a good starting point?

GhostBSD.

https://ghostbsd.org/

Without looking or knowing all your requirements, it's likely everything you need works the same. (I don't know anything about gnu/coreutils.)

I was under the impression this was one of the main use of *BSD (lot of networking hardware is based on it). Where did you see it was lagging behind ?