This is great to hear. I'm a huge fan of the BSD OS's, but it's been concerning that lately FBSD seemed to be falling out of favor. Unfortunately, many 'unix' people these days have only ever worked with Linux distros. While the distro model does provide a novel approach to packaging an OS that has it's strengths, there are some downsides. I love Linux for the suppor, the rapid release cycles, and the many different…
And the man pages. Oh, how wondrous they were. This first thing I had to do was learn to NOT google for how to accomplish something, but just read the man page. Often, there's not much on google about something because there was no need for someone to document how they accomplished it, they just did what the man page said and it worked.
In linux, the man pages are generally skeletons outlining some flags and what something might support. In BSD (or at least OpenBSD) for core OS items, they are canonical. Compare:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/ifconfig
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ifconfig
Note: One the reasons the OpenBSD ifconfig man page is so big is because on OpenBSD ifconfig does the job of multiple Linux utils, because it makes sense to have ifconfig control all the interface state.That said, I still mainly use Linux, specifically RHEL and derivatives, specifically because I think the enterprise Linux distros have a better support model for enterprise environments, where multiple machines need to be kept up to date or in sync, and you need to deploy identically (and repeatably) to systems.
Frankly, I'm surprised there's not a alternate, distro model for FreeBSD that's aimed at the enterprise to address these issues (or if there is, it's not popular enough for me to know of it). Maybe FreeBSD as an organization is coherent enough and does a good enough job at support for the distro in general that there's never been enough of push to really compete in the enterprise server market. Or maybe I'm just misinformed about how much BSD is in use in the enterprise. That's always a possibility.