I started using FreeBSD a few months ago for a Tor relay, trying to promote OS diversity. I had read these types of articles about how FreeBSD is so much cleane

I started using FreeBSD a few months ago for a Tor relay, trying to promote OS diversity. I had read these types of articles about how FreeBSD is so much cleaner and well documented than Linux, and I wanted to try it out. Honestly, I found it seriously lacking. It always seemed to me like most of those article writers had poor understanding of Linux, and now it seems to me like they have poor understanding of FreeBSD too. For example, this article, like many, touts the high quality of FreeBSD documentation. I found it to be similar to Linux documentation: a few excellent pages, mostly good pages, some mediocre pages, and lots of undocumented stuff. People (including me) often complain about the quality of Linux networking documentation, which is unquestionably terrible, but I found that FreeBSD isn't really that much better overall. Better in some places, worse in others, often you have to give up and go find the source code. Another thing often touted is the centralized development of FreeBSD making it more organized. This article betrays itself here by explaining that FreeBSD has three different firewalls, one originating locally, one forked from OpenBSD, and one forked from some dude. Now, to be fair, Linux is far from clean here: between ipchains, iptables, nftables, and bpfilter, Linux has gone through a lot of change. At least with Linux though there are at most two practical options at any given time, and there is a clear forward progression. With FreeBSD, I spent several hours trying to figure out the differences between each, which wasn't helped by the documentation problems: manual pages being fragmented and incomplete and the handbook being woefully out of date on this subject. It also seems like a lot of the hyped FreeBSD features are actually far behind Linux features. As other commenters have mentioned, Linux has device-mapper, which is similar to GEOM, and is used for LVM and modern RAID setups. Jails came before containers, but Linux namespaces are now far more powerful than jails, which aren't that much more than chroots. bhyve is nice, but lags behind QEMU/KVM. Poudriere is fine but most Linux distros have chroot builders too now. In conclusion, I don't find FreeBSD particularly attractive for any of the reasons that I hear often touted.