I used fbsd for 15+ years, 10+ years in production... and found it to be very stable. I never experienced the problem you mentioned with packages... but packag

I used fbsd for 15+ years, 10+ years in production... and found it to be very stable. I never experienced the problem you mentioned with packages... but packages are frozen at release.. so they're never updated... so you end up having to use ports for everything anyway. I always disliked having to compile every single package from source. If you have a large number of systems, it's worth setting up a build server and creating your own packages. Major upgrades ARE scarier than on Linux. They have a fairly new binary upgrade tool that I never used.. upgrades using build world generally work ok.. just update your source tree, wait a few days for anyone to report bugs on the mailing list, and then run build world. You can't do this over ssh though.. you need concole access. Again, if you have a large number of machines, setting up a build server is worth it. With that said though... FBSD has been slowly losing out in my company. 10 years ago, I used it everywhere... then fbsd neglected the desktop (not enough resources in the project), and Linux got so far ahead, that I was pretty much forced to switch to Linux on every workstation. Then a few years ago, found fbsd wasn't stable when virtualized.. ran a custom build on Xen for a while.. but eventually moved to Debian.. so it's now about 90% Linux.