You should try FreeBSD (2014)

Fortunately AWS and Digital Ocean have great support for FreeBSD!

> * building everything from source got old

No need nowadays.

pkg(1) works out of the box now. It's faster and way simpler than apt-get/yum.

> * lack of support for hardware (Linux has gotten really good at having drivers for hardware)

I recommend sticking with commodity hardware and making sure your chipset is supported before hand.

> * ports of desktop applications were not always available, and the POSIX shim to use Linux applications didnt always work without some hacking

Also happens. If only more applications made themselves POSIX compliant.

Normally though, just patching a few things in /files in the port is enough. Sometimes all it takes to port an app from Linux to FreeBSD is just fixes to makefile/automake/cmake files.

> * On the server side, Linux pretty much caught up on performance

Can you elaborate more on what you mean?

> * As the Linux community has grown, the resources available to Linux users are amazing. FreeBSD feels like Linux used to - always having to hack around and try to research how to make it work and nothing quite working smoothly (on the desktop - less of an issue for servers, where FreeBSD has always shined). Linux has reached a point where I use Linux as my primary desktop OS, and it works great. FreeBSD for the desktop feels like a step backwards.

Some things in FreeBSD are painful. I can use both FreeBSD and linux pretty efficiently and get done what I want.

That said, I have the opposite impression you have. To me, Linux seems like a hack and a step backwards.

For one, since linux as a kernel only covers so much area, distributions are left to curate how many of the design decisions go down.

Put yourself in the shoes of a developer who goes out of his or her way to learn upstart, for instance. You invest a good part of your time into the codebase, with a sense of confidence you're going to be able to utilize this onward in your career and future projects.

Then you find, this system you spent time learning is now obsolete and you have to relearn everything, There's systemd.

Imagine if this were to happen every few years with a new piece of software. You want to know why it feels useless to learn Xorg? Because they're trying to phase it out for mir. Well, mir isn't "done" yet, and even if it was ready, other software has to integrate with it. There is a huge collaboration that has to take place between developers learning how mir works, and keep in mind, they're getting exacerbated having a new system replace the old every couple of years. Then you have to manage the snafu of packaging it and how you engineer a switch like mir into the release.

Linux may seem more bleeding edge than BSD, but this is only a veneer. To developers, it's hell having your investment in learning something dashed away and having your time put into some venture you may or may not agree with.

BSD drastically simplifies these pains for devs. There is something called the "principle of least surprise". As well, freebsd's base system includes tools like rc(8), package management, etc. which in turns gives a vastly more cohesive experience.

I appreciate the work of both systems greatly - but few give a really care to the real reason you see drama over things like systemd. From my view in using BSD, it's like Linux's universe doesn't even care for its' developers time and sacrifice.

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said:

I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but:

1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of course it's not as proven as of now)

2) Usable containers finally have come to Linux in the form of Docker and everybody is absolutely hyped about it (I would argue though that Jails has more features, is more stable and mature)

The most obvious reason for me to use FreeBSD though is just the difference in philosophy. Don't rapidly make big changes, think everything through, don't surprise users, don't make upgrades that call for massive user intervention, and it's democratically governed and yes, it's a complete OS. Code quality is also better (have you actually looked at what code makes it into the Linux Kernel?), and I would argue therefore security and stability is way better.

Just my 2 cents, nothing wrong with Linux, have used it for years, now I would not want to go back though.

And a small Side Note: No systemd, not to start a flame war, but it is taking over the linux-sphere and I find it's design just horrific

Small reason to use Linux--Linux has taken over the embedded market. Hardware vendors (e.g., Broadcom, Intel) offer BSP (board support packages) for Linux but not any of the BSDs.

The BSP in embedded does sort-of what the PC BIOS does. The BSP is the code to bring the microcontroller from cold start to booting something. Booting Linux is supported by large vendors.

Embedded hardware vendors also offer Linux drivers. Not so much anything else.

Starting with 10.0 they improved packaging, so you can use FreeBSD in binary-only setup.

As for your other problems, FreeBSD is targeted toward servers so that's where your problems come from. I like FreeBSD a lot and have been using it since version 4.7, but I still prefer to use OpenSuSE for my desktop/laptop.