FreeBSD excels at giving you control over how the OS is packaged and built. The ports and packages system is great and makes it straightforward to compile or install packages, respectively. You can build the entire OS with 'make world', which is good if you want to build a stripped-down distro for special purpose use. The BSD license lets you roll a proprietary OS if you want to (Juniper uses FreeBSD in their routers IIRC). It also has a nice ZFS implementation that's supported as a first class citizen due to the BSD license.

Traditionally, it is also known to have a more scalable network stack than Linux, as well as super solid virtual memory and i/o systems.

I still like FreeBSD a lot and donate to the FreeBSD Foundation so they can keep doing what they do, since I think competition is great. But I'll say that in my opinion, the performance and stability differential between FreeBSD and Linux is mostly gone practically speaking. It's still much better organized than Linux distros, and the man pages are great, but I feel that unless you are looking for a BSD licensed OS, Linux is now "good enough" for heavy duty networking and i/o, where in the past you might have chosen FreeBSD for that role. There are some notable exceptions (Netflix uses FreeBSD for their CDN for example), but I do think that Linux has caught up in most areas where FreeBSD previously had a strong lead.

I still have a FreeBSD machine though, cause I love the OS to death. Happy user since 2.1.7.

For one thing, it is a real UNIX in terms of lineage and not a clone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA

http://www.informit.com/store/design-and-implementation-of-t...

Just why is being a "real" UNIX that important?

It is not at all important. Just ignore everyone who tries to lead you down that lane.

The overall culture among the OS users, developers and the respective architecture design decisions.

Personally, I don't care that much.

With time I became increasingly interested in the Xerox PARC world and how much better our current developer experience could have been if those systems had won the market instead of AT&T ones.

I love FreeBSD (and have used it for years and years) but I'll be the first to say the community of FreeBSD (and OpenBSD for that matter) is about as neckbeard as you can get in a community. #FreeBSD on Freenode is one of those Freenode channels that make you want to log off for good. Where a good many Linux communities are helpful and inclusive, the BSD communities are mostly atrocious and toxic. Be mindful of that if you start asking around about BSD.

I was convinced by awesome documentation and a very straight-forward implementation. If I want to understand how $thing works, I look at init-scripts and source and I get it within a few minutes. I never ever feel like searching for a solution on google because the infrastructure is so clean that it's faster to read its source than to read half-baked solutions on stackoverflow.