I've used Linux as my primary OS for the better part of 5 years now (the Arch distro), and I thought the discussion the author gives here is at least a compelli

I've used Linux as my primary OS for the better part of 5 years now (the Arch distro), and I thought the discussion the author gives here is at least a compelling one. The idea of ports and how they compare to the pacman package manager is quite interesting to me. I don't know enough to make an informed comparison, but I do know that if I let my system sit longer than a year I risk having to reinstall from scratch (whereas the author states a ten year old install can be brought up to date with relative ease). The author describes a lot that I find to be convincing; enough so that I may give a *BSD a shot for a year or two. I don't have any particular bias for one platform or another as the only things I want from my OS at this point are a semblance of control and some privacy.