For me, it's not really about the kernel but the whole OS, userland included. I agree it's still mostly matter of taste, or maybe more honestly, what you're use

For me, it's not really about the kernel but the whole OS, userland included. I agree it's still mostly matter of taste, or maybe more honestly, what you're used to. Some people really like apt-get/dpkg but I prefer working with "make buildworld/installworld" and the ports system on FreeBSD. Also, though it's not something I've taken advantage of much, I love how on FreeBSD I can "cd /usr/src/bin/ls" and hey: there's the source for ls! If I wanted to, I could hack it, and run "make install" right there. I prefer this over (for example) source packages with Doogie's Build System on Debian.