Linux used to be able to run just as lean as the BSDs, and perhaps still can (see Slackware).

but i fear that as it has gotten more attention in the corporate world more and more complexity has crept in as said corporate world wants something akin to AD and group policy so that the compute resources can be matched more closely to the division flow charts.

This, in combo with a ongoing "users are sheep that need a shepherd" attitude from certain elements of the community leads to complexity piling on.

I keep hearing this ad nauseam, but what makes a system useful in the first place is the vast repository of third-party applications and not the base install (which you call "a complete system").

FreeBSD still has a plethora of 3rd party applications, it's just that they enforce things like what you can put in /etc and /var and so on, making things much more regular.

Could you please list a few examples of these 3rd party FreeBSD applications that you have in mind? Thanks!

The FreeBSD Ports Collection[1] is the main means of installing 3rd party software on FreeBSD. Precompiled packages are available, too. You can view a list of available ports on FreshPorts[2]. Of course you can always just compile and build your own software if you choose.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html [2] http://www.freshports.org/categories.php

Lately, since pkg was introduced I find myself installing stock packags most of the time. Only if I want X compile time feature enabled I'd use the ports system. Updates are faster as well. I used to `make world`, now I just do `freebsd-update -r <release> upgrade`.

I'm still a new user so I deliberately choose to compile ports to learn the FreeBSD way of thinking about stuff, understand how packaging works under the hood, and not fall into the trap of thinking it's "almost a Linux". Compiling ports is surprisingly convenient (at least after I learned the config-recursive make target...) and works most of the time.

But that said, letting the compilation of JDK 1.8 run overnight isn't exactly convenient, and for the next install I'm likely to use precompiled packages, confident that I do know how to compile ports on my own should I want to.

Yes, cases similar to building jdk from the ports collection are exactly why prebuilt packages exist. It's now very easy to provision a new system since the new package manager was introduced in 10R, pretty much like in Linux. Yet you also have the option of using ports tree and customizing packages yourself using `make config` and the building and installing them using `make` and `make install`. This is easier than installing source rpms or debs and customizing your build mainly because it's menu driven and all the popular options are on the menu.

FreeBSD provides a quartely branch (enabled by default since 10.2) with prebuilt packages that are supported up to 3 months, to avoid moving too fast and breaking things. There's also the latest branch, with the latest and greatest stuff.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/p...

In my experience, the design of FreeBSD makes compiling projects much more easy. The standardized system really helps at many tasks.

But few projects are designed to only support FreeBSD. In the UNIX world, Autoconf still reigns supreme.

Autoconf is completely orthogonal to the base/ports split and FreeBSD vs Linux or any other UNIX.

All the ports are simply automatically configured with "--prefix=/usr/local".

The Ports collection is similar in scope to any of the application databases maintained by Linux distros such as Redhat and Ubuntu.

In fact, many of the packages are exactly the same from the same upstream. The differences are freebsd specific patches to fix small (like enabling or disabling different compile flags) or large (for example in the case of gnome or openjdk which requires effort to port) issues, but the packages are all there.

Yes, I have used FreeBSD and ports. I thought OP's message implied that there are 3rd party applications that are available exclusively for FreeBSD.

For a while there, one such feature was ZFS. I know ZOL is a thing, and the pool versions are the same, but I'd bet ZFS on FreeBSD is still more stable/standard than ZOL. (It's been a while since I tried to learn the differences between ZOL/ZFS under FreeBSD so that could be out of date)

ZFS on FreeBSD does not fit the definition of 'third party'.

It’s as third party as I imagine a production file system should be.

Do you realize that you can compile open source programs for FreeBSD and FreeBSD can run linux binaries?

Yes I know open source programs compile and run on FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems. And also that FreeBSD can run at least some Linux binaries.

I mistakenly assumed that OP was referring to 3rd party applications that were exclusive to FreeBSD.

It's a FOSS project. Typically, FOSS operating systems differentiate on system features/applications and not on 3rd party applications. Things like package management, file system support, etc.

Sure, but that's not what makes a computer useful in the first place.

List some well known ones for Linux. There's a 95% chance there's a FreeBSD port

Have 27,569 examples: https://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html

Keep in mind you need a good base system in order for the third party applications to run reliably.

But how can we measure the quality of the base system? I tried FreeBSD again a while back, but there were pretty bad bugs even in basic UNIX utilities like grep [1], some utilities + UTF-8, and I also had some kernel panics.

[1] I reported one of them in the FreeBSD bug tracker (+ patch). OpenBSD was actually really quick to solve this (I think tedu@ patched it), while the bug lingered for a long time with no activity on FreeBSD's end.

As a user that is true. As an administrators the you are using those utilities more and so the complete system is important.