Much, much improved with the introduction of pkgng. Now you can use the stock binary packages without going through the ports tree. The workflow is "pkg updat

Much, much improved with the introduction of pkgng. Now you can use the stock binary packages without going through the ports tree. The workflow is "pkg update", "pkg install ...", "pkg upgrade", "pkg delete ..." (includes automatic dependency removal). It's basically the same user experience as APT or yum. Then, there's whatever PC-BSD uses, which is also supposed to be very user friendly. (I wouldn't know. PC-BSD stopped supporting 32-bit PCs a few releases back, so I gave up on it.) That said, you can still build and distribute custom packages---the biggest strength of the FreeBSD Ports tree compared to other distributions, in my opinion. This too has improved with the introduction of the OPTIONSNG framework and the Poudriere build system. It used to be that you had to manually run "make config" per port or to somehow shoehorn per-port options into /etc/make.conf. All of that's been replaced with a much more sensible way to configure the port build process. For example, the following sets the default versions of Perl and Apache to pull in as dependencies (if needed by the port), and then it configures several ports: WITH_OPENSSL_PORT=YES DEFAULT_VERSIONS= perl5=5.18 apache=2.4 ca_root_nss_SET= ETCSYMLINK moreutils_UNSET= MANPAGES Poudriere handles en masse package building. If you want to build and distribute your own custom package repository, you'll want to use Poudriere to manage the process for you. For more information see http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/poudriere http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/poudriere first, then RTFM. It's super easy to use. Also, you can custom build a few packages with Poudriere, but fall back on the main FreeBSD package repository. It's pretty stellar. Nowadays, I only need to use portsnap/portupgrade when bootstrapping my Poudriere deployment.