alt Hacker News> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking)
I started using FreeBSD 26 years ago when I worked for Sendmail, who had a couple of core committers on staff or staff-adjacent. Back then the refrain was "it can't do nearly as much as Linux, but what it does do it's much better than Linux".
And specifically it was known that if you wanted the best possible networking stack, FreeBSD was the choice to make (And also why Netflix uses it, for the networking stack).
All this to say, is it true that Linux now has better network performance, or did you mistype that?
The networking subsystem is probably the place where FreeBSD is most competitive with Linux.
Linux just supports so much more hardware capabilities and fancy ways of doing things (e.g. io_uring, bpf logic in kernel etc.) that an expertly setup and tuned Linux system will probably exceed the networking speed of FreeBSD and provide more features while doing so. I'm not a networking expert by any means but this is what my understanding is.
I use FreeBSD for mostly for taste and the other reasons I outlined in my detailed answer above even though Linux is superior performance wise.