Posted by todsacerdoti 11/2/2025
* Ease of management - more holistically designed.
* Rock solid parts that fits together - more holistically designed.
* ZFS, jails, bhyve, dtrace, ports.
* If it works today, it works tomorrow.
* A more approachable community (which AMD says is the reason why they are developing for FreeBSD before Linux now).
* Transparency and simplicity of how it works - if you can understand it, you can manage it and fix it.
* Documentation.
* Fun! Linux is not fun.
But the nicest thing about the software in the base is that they are developed in sync with the OS, so their code can be simpler.
The other major difference is FreeBSD ports lets you chose the build options - the defaults are normally good, but if you don't like how Debian (Arch...) choose to build your packages you are not stuck. Ports even mixes with binary packages so you can choose the defaults for some things and build others yourself and the system will track everything and when things need to be updated. This is something you rarely need, but when you do FreeBSD soundly beats everyone else just because the effort is so much less (again though, most people never need this in the first place - and Debian has pushed less need of this on applications which is a good thing)
And it shows.
You don't need to start over in a new OS for this. Just don't cargo cult. Linux can do all this fine natively without containers and without risk in very straightforward ways if you ignore all the "deployal" memes or ideas of fallbacks. Just install nginx from your repos on your desktop, throw in some .html files to a directory and play.