This post is awesome, but I do have to argue your point on FreeBSD 5. The release might have been very structured, but for me it was a gigantic clustercoitus th

This post is awesome, but I do have to argue your point on FreeBSD 5. The release might have been very structured, but for me it was a gigantic clustercoitus that caused me to turn my back on FreeBSD. Just one of the many annoyances: The package manager would attempt to use gunzip on the new packages which had been tar/bzipped and thus binary package installation was completely borked for a good while after release. I ended up having to manually patch the package utils. I agree with everything else. It's amazing how Open, Net and FreeBSD work together on a lot of things, particularly hardware support and userland performance. The BSD Way (all of it) is a great comfort to me, and knowing The BSD Way ahead of time really helped me out when I went to start working on big enterprise platforms like Solaris and AIX. I fear many GNU/Linux admins would take much longer to adapt to how things are done on those platforms than someone with a really solid BSD background.