Plus an offsite virtual web server/backup mail server.
Not using jails or anything fancy. Just leave them alone aside from running freebsd-update and pkg update commands occasionally. Stable as.
The only complicated part is that on a couple of systems the motherboards the realtek network card isn't detected and so to bootstrap the install process the easiest way is to tether a phone via USB in order to get a network connection to then pkg install the driver for it.
Can dual booting my main PC - trying to wean myself of Windows 10, but as I said gaming/audio just works. Gaming on FreeBSD is problematic, I did manage to play Factorio for 15 minutes, but then it locks up complaining about a missing ALSA file, its acknowledged that its suboptimal and gaming Linux is just easier than continually messing around trying to get all the bits working consistently. Some people insist on it, but it still seems too precarious for me.
Hence considering Cachy OS. Wanted to triple boot my desktop machine, but turns out the motherboard despite having four slots for drives, doesn't actually support more than 2 of them. Uh, thanks Gigabyte...
The media PC is a ASUS NUC 14 Pro Mini running CachyOS, mostly happy with it compared to other distro's but they all have their quirks. Plus it hard locks occasionally when streaming (e.g. Netflix). Just remembering which package manager and how to use it is a minor challenge. I remember the era where there was basically just .deb and .rpm
Also found someone else that had experienced the same: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/t6795f/emer...
Created an account to submit it all to Fedora(/Redhat/IBM). And it just got marked wont fix. Apparently the filesystem guy didn't think it was a filesystem problem (despite being caused by fstab) and just closed it.
Apparently getting stuck in the below loop is an acceptable response due to a typo in /etc/fstab.
--
Reloading system manager configuration. Starting default target. You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or “exit” to continue booting.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked. See sulogin(8) to continue.
Press Enter to continue.
Reloading system manager configuration. Starting default target. You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or “exit” to continue booting.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked. See sulogin(8) to continue.
Press Enter to continue.
etc.
Now none of them seem to be. Went distribution hopping and trying to find something. I'm a FreeBSD guy mostly - and in my experience its still not year of the desktop for Linux despite me wanting to ditch Windows 10. FreeBSD is way behind as a desktop OS, although it doesn't have the ridiculous baggage of Linux's audio subsystem.
Had CachyOS lock up on me tonight, but its still been the least problematic most dependable variant of Linux I've tried so far, even if its sproriadic in failing to correctly mount shares. Pop-OS has been the next-best, but they're falling behind some of the other distro's.
The fucktards at Fedora(/Redhat) closed a "I can't boot because of an error in fstab" in Fedora as won't fix. I couldn't even get to a superuser shell - so the system is in an unrecoverable state even from console. Rescued it via a livedisk and manually mounting filesystems, but the response was inexcusable given the time I put into the bug submission. Trying to mount network drives and failing to boot, as a result of not checking there's a valid network connection first is not something I'd expect in 2025...
Tried Ubuntu and its a complete mess compared to its former self, and Debian is so far behind, I may as well use FreeBSD as a desktop.
And the fact they've ditched ifconfig for a more painful user experience is just dumb. It's still the least problematic of distro's I've tried though. Gaming (somewhat usable on Linux) and audio (still a mess) are what keep me on Win10 even though I want to ditch it. Apple can go get fucked, but their TV shows are kind of impressive.
The BSD's just keeps working (yes, there's less hardware support) and you don't have to keep learning a new 'dialect' because the kernel and OS stay relatively consistent over time. I still think the sudo command on Linux is dumb. Let me explictly su, get stuff done and log out. None of this type your own password to get to do superuser stuff. I mean seriously...?
Edited: Downvoted because they can't handle my personal experience? With no rebuttal? Even HN isn't what it used to be.