Just by reading about it. I've used FreeBSD some as well, I know what knobs and sysrc and the like are about etc., but only as a fun hobby, to see what 'the oth

Just by reading about it. I've used FreeBSD some as well, I know what knobs and sysrc and the like are about etc., but only as a fun hobby, to see what 'the other side' is like. I walked away feeling the system is if anything closer to Linux than I would have expected. I am most interested in the out of the box experience. If we're going to compare tuning for maximum performance, we probably need someone who has experience tuning both kinds of boxes for that, to get a minimally biased read. "Less churn" is always a valuable property, and one the BSDs are famous for, but at least personally I experience manageably little churn on Debian servers as-is. Churn and its consequences seems to come down more to personal familiarity than anything, and so I don't really include it under the banner of technical reasons per se.