I think there's a difference between using BSD to build an appliance and running BSD as a day-to-day system.
pfSense is a wonderful firewall appliance. FreeNAS is a wonderful storage appliance. If you need pf or native ZFS, a BSD is probably your best way to get it.
If you want to run a random headless server to mess around with, you are probably going to have a harder time with any of the BSDs than you would with even bleeding-edge Linux distros. If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user.
---
There are, of course, people who are happily using BSD-based desktops right now and I am certainly not denying them anything, but even they'd have to admit they would have been able to get most of the same experience with a lot less effort on a modern Linux.
> If you want to run a random headless server to mess around with, you are probably going to have a harder time with any of the BSDs than you would with even bleeding-edge Linux distros
Actually, I became a BSD user after just trying OpenBSD out of curiosity on my headless server after years of running Linux. The experience was so damn good.
> There are, of course, people who are happily using BSD-based desktops right now and I am certainly not denying them anything, but even they'd have to admit they would have been able to get most of the same experience with a lot less effort on a modern Linux.
It's the opposite for me. Modern Linux distros are a pain; I can't find one I really like. Whenever I ask people to recommend a distro that feels like OpenBSD, I get recommendations from people who obviously haven't used OpenBSD in two decades. Maybe they tried FreeBSD two decades ago, and then figured that some old Linux distro was kinda similar..
Frankly I don't think the Linux way of "ducktape a bunch of third party packages together" will ever produce a distro that comes close to being as pleasant as OpenBSD. At least they'd have to heavily patch things and diverge from upstream.
Just because OSX has a very outdated BSD-derived userland does not make it a BSD. The OSX kernel a mach microkernel and shares no code from the BSD projects. This is a farcry from the *BSDs which can directly trace all of their code and history all the way back to 4.4BSD
pfSense is a wonderful firewall appliance. FreeNAS is a wonderful storage appliance. If you need pf or native ZFS, a BSD is probably your best way to get it.
If you want to run a random headless server to mess around with, you are probably going to have a harder time with any of the BSDs than you would with even bleeding-edge Linux distros. If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user.
---
There are, of course, people who are happily using BSD-based desktops right now and I am certainly not denying them anything, but even they'd have to admit they would have been able to get most of the same experience with a lot less effort on a modern Linux.