I've been using FreeBSD for servers and as an occasional daily driver for the past 16 years. Linux is a great operating system that I use for my work and also

I've been using FreeBSD for servers and as an occasional daily driver for the past 16 years. Linux is a great operating system that I use for my work and also in situations where I have Linux hardware support but not for FreeBSD (I prefer Linux for laptops over FreeBSD). It's not a bad thing that Linux's core utilities are not developed alongside the kernel; in fact, part of what makes the GNU toolkit so flexible is the fact that it runs on a variety of Unix-like operating systems instead of just Linux, a great thing for BSD users as well as users of lesser-used Unix-like operating systems like Minix, Solaris, and GNU Hurd. But with that being said, what I love about FreeBSD is that the core utilities are very well documented. I believe the quality of FreeBSD's documentation is an artifact of the BSDs long-standing culture of providing high-quality documentation; some of the man pages have origins in AT&T Unix and the days of BSD up to 4.4BSD, but it's been updated over all these years to reflect changes. The AT&T Unix versions and the Berkeley-developed BSDs always had wonderful documentation, much of it written by Unix legends like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, and others. Even the post-Berkeley documentation still captures this spirit. Plus, I happen to prefer man pages to the info pages that GNU utilities tend to prefer since I can never remember the keys used for navigating the hyperlinks found in info pages. I also like how FreeBSD ships with some traditional supplementary Unix documents, which have helpful tutorials for classic Unix tools. The FreeBSD handbook is very well written, and it can be easily downloaded. For people who sometimes need to do kernel hacking, there's Marshall Kirk McKusick et al.'s wonderfully written "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Second Edition," which I have a copy of. I find the source code of FreeBSD easier to read than the source code of Linux. FreeBSD reminds me a lot of PostgreSQL, another high-quality open source project with excellent documentation that happens to also derive from UC Berkeley.