Indeed the memories I have of Mandrake and RedHat is a package management nightmare, where not enough things were in the official repos, urpmi had to be install

Indeed the memories I have of Mandrake and RedHat is a package management nightmare, where not enough things were in the official repos, urpmi had to be installed after the fact, you had to add many third-party repos and/or many standalone rpm packages. Often you'd end up with X.rpm needing Y.rpm v1.1 and Z.rpm needing Y.rpm v1.2, and you had to be really cautious not to screw up your system. Now the argument that with BSD and ports you have no library problems because you compile everything from source and the ports are all centralized is, well, wrong. Say you install X and Y which depend on libZ; you then upgrade Y, which pulls in a new libZ, which breaks the unchanged X (since it has been built against the earlier libZ). That is, unless you rebuild X to link against the new libZ. Even heard of Gentoo's revdep-rebuild? Hopefully this is mitigated on FreeBSD (and conversely made comparatively worse on Gentoo) because base components do not get bumped like that, so most things link against the seldom moving base and you're done (whereas on Gentoo, you have fun bumping libc or libxml).