I'd say that people recommend it because it's mostly just plug-and-play and works out of the box. You don't need to learn much about how RAID or ZFS works or un

I'd say that people recommend it because it's mostly just plug-and-play and works out of the box. You don't need to learn much about how RAID or ZFS works or understand every little detail about nix administration. If you follow the guide it's pretty hard to go wrong. I however wanted to learn all the details when I set up my NAS, so went with Debian Jessie and BTRFS. I only use AFS and NFS, and I'm the only user, so don't need half the features FreeNAS provides. Graphs are pretty, but I can quickly get all the information I need via SSH.