I had this same experience a few years ago, though more out of necessity (my very old hardware at the time was no longer being supported.) pkgng was brand new a

I had this same experience a few years ago, though more out of necessity (my very old hardware at the time was no longer being supported.) pkgng was brand new and immature and it was an opportunity to do some fun things like create my own pkg building infrastructure/server and an HFS+ FUSE driver that I still mean to share. But once the struggle to have a functioning system was through and the novelty wore off I went back pretty quickly. At that time BSD was caught in the middle of major open source projects breaking compatibility for systemd, GNOME was several years behind, and the realities of running software on what was treated as a perpetually second or third-class platform made it difficult to avoid unseen bugs or outright breakage. Things have probably settled down a bit since then and I like the FreeBSD project in sort of an idealized form very much and wouldn't discourage its use (especially if staying within the mainline packages), but it is quite a lot of work, and when it came to choosing a secondary * nix to boot the next time I saved myself some trouble (believe it or not) and installed Arch. It's difficult enough to get something resembling the UX I'm used to without having to do it with a quirky shadow version of the software ecosystem. None of this is the fault of the project per se,* unfortunately it's just a natural consequence of usage share in an ecosystem already mainly comprised of volunteers. I wonder if the author will feel the same after a bit of settling in. *some of the pkgng bugs were but I would expect those not to be relevant anymore