the ports often dont work (or require a rodeo-size production to get them to work). A couple of years ago I installed FreeBSD, went to ports and did a "make ins

the ports often dont work (or require a rodeo-size production to get them to work). A couple of years ago I installed FreeBSD, went to ports and did a "make install clean" of vim, and it wasted 10 minutes of my time only to fail on some arcane package's compilation. I asked for help and was told that "ports are not the OS, contact the ports maintainer for your pkg", technically true, but they tout their ports as this awesome, universal collection of amazing software. (the real workaround is for common packages like vim, you use "pkg install vim" and it installs binaries). The beauty of ports (if they worked) is that you can do cool things with the USE flags (this should be familiar to Gentoo users, my mind is drawing a blank though for a concrete example to explain this to someone unfamiliar). Recently I tried to install prolog on OpenBSD-7.3, it failed even from pkg. I didn't want to waste my time on ports, so I just wiped the OS from my machine (running neofetch takes a couple seconds, which gives you an idea of how slow it is, however if I ever needed a very secure machine (such as an SSH bastion or anything internet-facing) I wouldn't hesitate to pull it up again. FreeBSD is almost usable as a desktop though. Only thing keeping me is audio wont work over HDMI/DisplayPort, but I totally understand they don't have time to fix all that hoopla. A pro OR a con, depending on your POV is that FreeBSD support really expects you to put your big-boy pants on when you ask for help. They get (justifiably) annoyed if you dont RTFM and concisely lay out everything you tried to do to fix it. For various reasons, the Linux ecosystem is way more tolerant of SO-style "how do I do X on linux" type questions.