Some people care a lot about Open Source Ideology. The BSDs are free in a different way than Linux is Free, GPL vs BSD licensing.

Separately the source code for FreeBSD is pretty clean and easy to read. I needed to modify the behaviour of one of the core utils a few years ago, and I found it very easy to do. The C library that it uses is also pretty well written. It won't be quite as clean as OpenBSD, but it is a lot simpler than trying to figure out glibc(which was possibly intentionally obfuscated to avoid lawsuits).

The build system for FreeBSD is also pretty simple to figure out. You can download the source, modify the kernel or userland and rebuild world in like at most like 30 commands. I haven't tried with Debian or any Linux distro, but I would imagine it would be harder given the separation of the kernel and userland.

If you've experienced computer use for any length of time, that is the root of everything.

like for instance:

> Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted.

I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this.

>I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this.

You'd be surprised -- unless you follow dev forums for various elements of your DE/distro.

macOS moves because it updates into a clean system as far as those configs are concerned.

In any case, it takes like 2 minutes to write a shell script to deploy your pf.conf/automount config after every such upgrade, and 1 seconds to use it. Or to look for the proper, permanent, way to do it: https://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/15/using-pf-on-os-x-mount...

With brew and brew mas you can also automate command line and GUI app installations, even custom font installs, among other things.

I can get up and running into a new machine in ~2 hours from a clean install with an automated shell script and get all my apps and cli apps, custom shell aliases/scripts, configuration for dev tools like VSCode and IntelliJ, documents (from TM/Dropbox) and so on.

> I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this.

I mean Gnome3 has removed features pretty regularly that people liked without any real discussion. I don't think that is a closed/open source thing, more of a project communication thing.

GNOME 3 is an anomaly, and the community still actively maintains 2 as MATE (Ubuntu Mate was on HN’s frontpage for a bit ~2 weeks ago).

I don't know if it's clear, but pf.conf contains your firewall rules.

I know there are issues upgrading applications on every platform, but I think pf.conf should be treated in a very conservative manner.

To the author, it would seem so. There might be a clue in the site name, too: "Freedom Be With All".