>Is it me, or does it seem that the BSDs are really losing more and more mind share as time marches on

Well BSD is dying was said already 15 years ago, BUT the project should be more responsive, an example:

You send in a patch with a updated port, and you wait 3 month until it's in the tree, in the meantime already a new version is out. I think if the users make the work and send in patches (just with a changed version-number and zero or nearly zero dependencies) some porters @ freebsd should act much quicker (some are super fast and helpfull but not as many), otherwise they will change the os or make there own fork of the package tree like i do.

I do agree that the BSD ports maintainers are a fair bit slower than their Linux counterparts. Having said this, though, I do admire the way the port maintainers train up their replacements and/or add others with commit access. They mentor them. This does lead to higher code quality in the end. I fully agree with the notion that BSD is engineered whilst Linux is "grown". Good and bad to both approaches.

>I do admire the way the port maintainers train up their replacements and/or add others with commit access

Yes absolutely, and it's no question that packaging is really hard work, i wanna thank everyone that works on my most beloved system, ESPECIALLY the packagers.

I started using FreeBSD on a VPS a couple months ago, and I've moved my home router to be FreeBSD -- PF is /so much better/ than anything else wrt understandability, and putting miscellaneous services the router runs in jails is pretty nice, and feels simpler to set up "right" than the same with Docker (e.g. no messing around with Docker volumes, only to discover you've accidentally deleted years of family photos).

> you've accidentally deleted years of family photos

Oof, that hurts.

I'm going to add a check right now to PhotoStructure to assert that people's library is not stored within the container to prevent this from happening to my users.

It's good stuff, but I would also suggest tinkering with OpenBSD and its offerings. A bit simpler, but still fun. It's all good stuff and fun to play with.

I love FreeBSD much more than Linux, and i wish i could use it instead of Linux on my desktop/notebook machines.

But the graphics have to play a catch up game with Linux, and in my experience a couple of drivers were missing or not working properly (like wireless stuff, acpi, etc..)

The performance of the network stack is the best of any OS, and the interface with the OS in general is much more well designed than Linux, giving Linux is more of a Bazar effort with things stitched here and there to make some things works.

It's sad that the amount of man-hours on Linux, make it almost unavoidable and i bet this will be more and more true with time even with Windows and OS X.

It unfortunately does. And it's a vicious circle.

Linux has the most mindshare, so most things are built for Linux and don't run (or don't run as well) on FreeBSD. As a result, more people use Linux resulting in increased mindshare, and the process repeats.

It makes me sad because I really like FreeBSD.

As a Linux user, the existence of open-spec boards that I know are supported by it (and a variety of other OSes) actually puts the BSDs more on my radar than they would be otherwise.