That's the main problem with Linux these days: Experience with distro A rarely transfers to distro B.
Also, at least with Ubuntu, switching to a new LTS means that most administration tools have been replaced with different (usually buggier) ones, so knowledge of the old release doesn't necessarily transfer either.
It wasn't this way in the early days, but the community focus stopped aligning with end user interest about a decade go. At that point fragmentation + complexity exploded.
I say this as a big time BSD friend, the same can be said about the BSDs. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are very different , I’ve never used NetBSD, but I can only imagine it’s not the same as the other two.
Yah, it's a bit wrong that people compare an operating system like FreeBSD (or Solaris or AIX etc) to "Linux" which is just a kernel. The distribution IS the operating system, and of course there will be differences.
SystemD is changing things up a bit and packaging up all the "boilerplate" and making things more consistent across distros, which is convenient sure. I joke that the old adage "GNU/Linux" should be updated to "SystemD/Linux".
I agree with you, FreeBSD should be judged by its own right against every other operating system out there, including the 100s of GNU/systemd/Linux-distributions, and every obscure operating system out there. How deep you dig depends on you.
My preferences have fallen on a combination of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Manjaro Linux, with FreeBSD my main operating system.
The main draw backs are
1) poorer wifi support *
2) non-existing bluetooth support
But the main advantages of FreeBSD
1) FreeBSD is a source distribution first, always has been, always will be.
2) The most permissive software licenses are prefered, which I think is really cool
3) By far the best package managers. both ports and pkg are simpler to use than anything I have tried from any other distribution. I know some people swear by Slackware, Gentoo and Arch, but in general their package management do not appeal to me. Plus it always seems like the linux distributions are either source or binary. Sure, you can usually do both(except for the source first distributions) on most linux distributions, it's usually inferior to ports/pkg.
4) first class ZFS support
5) I get to run the same system on my desktop as I do on my production systems which I consider a big advantage.
I have resolved the WIFI support by running wifibox, a tiny virtualized Linux vm running on bhyve. It gives me a 20-fold increase in speed! Coincidentally, it’s based on Aline Linux, which the blog post is all about!
When I want to play games, I reboot to Windows or Manjaro, which takes about 60 seconds... Both fairly stable and easy to maintain operating systems. I like MacOS as well, but I don't have any apple computers anymore.
It's been a while since the first-class ZFS support had any advantage for the user beyond an initial install. Maintenance on it was so limited that they ended up rebasing on ZFS on Linux anyway, making it literally less first-class than on Linux.
Today you can get ZFS packages from contrib in Debian and run it for several years with no problems. I know because I did that from Debian 9 (2017) through Debian 12 (2023) and still going. Ironically, Debian 9 took over that ZFS pool from a FreeBSD server, and there is not one part of that migration that I regretted.
The first 3 points are pretty much covered by nixos too. 1. It's source compilation based, but you download the cached result if it exists. 2. Unfree option has to be explicitly set if you want that for specific packages. 3. Depends on the tastes, but it's pretty easy.
Afair, for switching from 20.04 to 22.04 I had to ensure network configs are under netplan and that's all.
What's imimportant as well, there is no rush to switch to newer LTS, no problem to plan and test migration over 1 year be needed as old LTS is still supported.
Also, at least with Ubuntu, switching to a new LTS means that most administration tools have been replaced with different (usually buggier) ones, so knowledge of the old release doesn't necessarily transfer either.
It wasn't this way in the early days, but the community focus stopped aligning with end user interest about a decade go. At that point fragmentation + complexity exploded.