This is pretty informative. I've used OpenBSD for years, and what he says holds there as well. (OpenBSD fits me better, but FreeBSD is a great OS.) He alludes

This is pretty informative. I've used OpenBSD for years, and what he says holds there as well. (OpenBSD fits me better, but FreeBSD is a great OS.) He alludes to OpenBSD favoring reinstalling rather than upgrading in place. To some extent, this is probably because the OpenBSD installer is quite spartan. Once you know the process, a whole OpenBSD server can be running and configured in well under a half hour. Depending on the system, that can be simpler than merging / updating everything. I update my desktop (chasing snapshots) and laptop (each numbered release, which for OpenBSD happens every 6 months), and just reinstall my firewall/server when I feel like it. Also, OpenBSD runs a monolithic kernel - all the drivers for the platform are included by default, so if your hardware is supported, it's autodetected on boot. No kernel rebuilding or modules necessary. (I don't think FreeBSD does this.) I've used an OpenBSD install disc to identify weird hardware that Linux didn't recognize. There are a lot of benefits from a packaging system that primarily builds from source: It's much easier to build a package with various options (OpenBSD calls them "FLAVORS"); build this, no-x11, use postgres for its stats, add support for vorbis, etc. He mentions this, but seeing apt-get struggle with dependencies if you go away from the default configuration (or worse yet, build something from source that other packages use!) really makes it clear. You don't have to build everything from source, either - there are cached packages for most things on the mirrors. (Building all of KDE or GNOME from source would take quite a while!) If PKG_PATH is set to a mirror, "pkg_add pkgname" will attempt to fetch the binary package and its dependencies.