I came into IT on FreeBSD back in 2004. Was a real fanboy and couldn't stop ranting about it. My first IT boss at the time got me into FreeBSD and PostgreSQL without actually knowing why. I had no real experience to back my opinion.

FreeBSD was my primary OS, both at work and at home.

To fast forward a bit I handed over my last BSD environment around 2012, last Solaris environment around the same time. After that I only had Linux responsibilities. Around 2014 I was running Debian as my primary OS and sent on a RHEL course in Stockholm.

The course leader sold RedHat to me so well that the very first night at the hotel I reinstalled my laptop from Debian to Fedora. Haven't looked back yet.

Been professionally building systems on Linux since before that. So I'd like to say my perspective spans over both sides of this argument. I've tried to summarize why I'd rather use Linux and why you might consider using BSD.

The only reason I can justify to use BSD is that the open source world needs competition. It would be dangerous if we only had one OS.

But all my professional sense of getting things done and keeping them stable tells me not to use it. Correction, I use OpenBSD on my router at home but that's it. OpenBSD has a reputation of being very secure (perhaps earned in part by having a relatively small user base) and I rarely need to login to make changes. Because the user space tools are horrible compared to Linux.

And I believe most of that stems from the community being much larger and therefore the software better tested and more mature.

I'm talking mainly about operational security and stability. I believe Linux does this much better than any BSD.

Less critical bugs, less issues with package management, better maintained packages and more binary packages available that don't require source building. Pretty much all things very reliant on a strong community.

More programmers available to fine tune user space tools and make them hum. A lot more docs available from hobbyists and officials.

Some of my friends today are hardcore BSD geeks and they often have to deal with system breaking bugs, kernel panics even. I can't remember the last time I saw a kernel panic in Linux. Almost every day I can see at least one issue in our chats dealing with package management or kernel and system bugs. Bugs in jails for example, or network management related to jails. They're often following the latest releases to remedy these but that's even worse than using Fedora on servers imo. Bleeding edge software just to avoid the bugs and be able to use the latest so called virtualization technology available.