FreeBSD excels at giving you control over how the OS is packaged and built. The ports and packages system is great and makes it straightforward to compile or in

FreeBSD excels at giving you control over how the OS is packaged and built. The ports and packages system is great and makes it straightforward to compile or install packages, respectively. You can build the entire OS with 'make world', which is good if you want to build a stripped-down distro for special purpose use. The BSD license lets you roll a proprietary OS if you want to (Juniper uses FreeBSD in their routers IIRC). It also has a nice ZFS implementation that's supported as a first class citizen due to the BSD license. Traditionally, it is also known to have a more scalable network stack than Linux, as well as super solid virtual memory and i/o systems. I still like FreeBSD a lot and donate to the FreeBSD Foundation so they can keep doing what they do, since I think competition is great. But I'll say that in my opinion, the performance and stability differential between FreeBSD and Linux is mostly gone practically speaking. It's still much better organized than Linux distros, and the man pages are great, but I feel that unless you are looking for a BSD licensed OS, Linux is now "good enough" for heavy duty networking and i/o, where in the past you might have chosen FreeBSD for that role. There are some notable exceptions (Netflix uses FreeBSD for their CDN for example), but I do think that Linux has caught up in most areas where FreeBSD previously had a strong lead. I still have a FreeBSD machine though, cause I love the OS to death. Happy user since 2.1.7.