Addendum: I've used FreeBSD as my daily driver (I hate that term) since around 2004. Including through cs/math university. With Windows in a VM for "I need it". The longer I've used it the more I'm annoyed by the trivialities of Linux distro management. And the bugs that happens between ill fitting parts composed by underfunded distro developers.

And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.

My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depends on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.