If you have supported hardware (and that’s a bit if and caveat; smaller than it used to be, but still quite large), then everything just works. Even little things like the built-in screen brightness buttons, just work regardless of if you’re in x11 or a terminal (same with volume buttons), because it’s designed as a complete system rather than a distribution of otherwise unrelated open source projects.

Compare:

https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/index.html

https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/13.0-RELEASE/usr/local/share/do...

It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land. After 50 years of development, they are largely feature-complete and are not going to be doing massive changes just for the sake of massive changes. As such they get much lower levels of "documentation rot", things rust a lot slower when nothing ever changes and as such it's a lot easier (and more productive) to build comprehensive documentation.

But the amount of churn in linux is insane, Ubuntu has used three completely different init systems in the 15 years since I started using Linux seriously. For java development, I routinely see and use StackOverflow answers from like 2009 that are completely valid still, and yet answers from that era are completely useless for Linux, which has invalidated that acquired-knowledge twice since then. You can pretty much sysadmin FreeBSD out of the handbook, and if you need to search then an answer from 2009 is usually still valid.

It's absolutely a cathedral-vs-bazaar situation. Cathedral is presented as a negative in that metaphor, but the cathedral ensures enough stability that you can start Having Nice Things instead of just constantly scrambling to rewrite everything every time a vendor thinks they've built a better mousetrap.

A lot of useful material with near-official status is kept under the Linux Documentation Project, https://tldp.org/ They have a git repository at https://github.com/tLDP/LDP

There are some cases of real churn in Linux but they're rare. The new init systems and such come with plenty of useful features that simplify many administration tasks: the reason for people being so unsatisfied with them is that they bring lots of what's effectively cowboy-coded hacks and prototype-quality code in order to enable these features. But rewriting all of this stuff from the ground up with a clean, Unix-like design (or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like, given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these) while preserving its feature set would involve more rather than less churn.

I‘d be curious to hear more about what you're referring to, if you were willing to expand. What foundational features are new to Linux that would be really useful for cleaner init system (etc.) designs?

ZFS would like a word. FreeBSD, for all intents and purposes, pioneered the adoption of ZFS for the everyday enthusiast.

I'm yet to dive in, I've only dabbled.

It's definitely a bit heavier than other filesystems but it's one of those things where I can't imagine setting up a Linux/Unix system without it anymore.

I wouldn't exactly classify ZFS as a "new" feature though. ZFS dates to 2004, OpenZFS dates to 2006, and OpenSolaris dates to 2010. 20 years is pretty well into "mature technology" by most standards, even 16 years is very mature by software standards.

These days I’m on macOS, mainly because of the hardware but also a few pieces of software that I have hard time replacing (Scrivener and Mathematica).

- "Linux® Binary Compatibility"

- "Describes the Linux® compatibility features of FreeBSD. Also provides detailed installation instructions for many popular Linux® applications such as Oracle® and Mathematica®."

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#preface-ove...

I wasn't able to find that exact reference in the docs of the current release (using a mobile device at the moment). However, there is a very useful forum thread for anyone interested. It's not a straightforward install, but it's definitely possible to install/use Mathematica on FreeBSD.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-13-0-runs-mathema...

Or video accelerated YouTube.. Or Microsoft office..

Really, I love OpenBSD, but I only really use it for (internet) networking these days, FreeBSD looks after my storage, and it's all proxmox with ubuntu 20.04 vms running k8s for apps.

Someday I'll switch back, but working as a freelancer with a lot of different customers bsds are just too painful to run bare metal (def works with ssh/mosh/tmux though!)

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq13.html#enablerec

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq13.html#webcam

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium...

You can get GPU accelerated YouTube videos in OpenBSD, provided you have a supported GPU in the first place. You have to use Firefox and enable gfx.webrender.all and layers.acceleration.force-enabled in about:config. I've been able to get up to 2Kp60 smooth as butter on Intel HD 530 graphics in OpenBSD 7.0. 4Kp60 plays and drops a few frames, but my monitor is 2K so I have no need for 4K playback anyway.

I've got the same questions about macOS to be honest

Not to mention consistency. On all other competing platforms consistency across applications tends to be rather bad.

- It’s UNIX, and has been since Snow Leopard, that makes some development tasks easier. YMMV

- I like the UI (personal preference)

- MS Office stuff is native

- I’ve heard the fan on my M1 box twice in a year

- Can run x86 Docker images via emulation, usually seamlessly

Docker is running in a Linux VM of course on a Mac, so there’s a slight performance hit.

Even all the SIP stuff doesn’t get in the way, in my experience.

A bunch of us have a trail of old macs that are weird to use because of the whole system is stuck on the last supported OS, which happens to be the most bloated for that hardware, and doesn’t receive updates anymore. Moving to another simpler system altogether makes it a better proposition. As a matter of choice, BSD is more familiar than linux in many ways.

M1 laptops are not in that position yet, but in 2 years I’d totally imagine getting rid of macos on sub machines.

If you are an OS & BSD aficionado, you like to spent time working with OpenBSD because <reasons> ok, but otherwise I would advise against it.