DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

- If you use Dtrace to troubleshoot a problem it's way beyond your scope of knowledge as a web developer. Dtrace is too deep and very specific to certain problems that you will never see because your regular nginx + php works fine in all cases.

- Not everyone wants and should be good at everything.

Just be good at what your doing well, I'm not saying that one shouldn't be curious but Dtrace isn't "an excuse" to install *BSD as a web dev.

- I want to have a stable base O/S to which I can always easily return.

- I want to be able to customize installed packages in an easily scalable way.

- I want a server O/S to be simple to maintain, relative to Windows or Solaris.

- I want the goddamned documentation installed.

During development it's difficult to get RHEL or Ubuntu back to a known-good set of base packages without fiddling a lot with the package manager. It's better nowadays with package groups and autoremoval supported in both yum and APT, but with FreeBSD, you can always punt, do "pkg delete -a && rm -rf /usr/local" (or "pkg_delete" in the before time), and start over. The base configuration is also pretty simple and centralized, with most of what you need in /etc/rc.conf or /etc/periodic.conf.

pkgng + poudriere + a suitable web server makes custom package management really, really easy. I haven't tackled Spacewalk or similar tools for Linux, but even building locally customized versions of packages on RHEL or Ubuntu is a moderately complicated process compared to the FreeBSD Ports Tree. On RHEL or Ubuntu, you typically have to install the developer tools, hunt down the source RPMs/DEBs, edit the package definition, run rpmbuild/debuild, and install the resulting RPM. Compare that to the FreeBSD Ports Tree, where you run one command to download/update your copy of the package definitions, add whatever package-specific knobs you need to /etc/make.conf, and run "cd /usr/ports/category/packagename && make install" (the compilers and everything come built into the base system).

I'm not going to start an argument about the relative merits of init systems, as systemd (Linux), SMF (Solaris), and SCM (Windows) all have their merits, but I personally like the simplicity of configuring everything through /etc/rc.conf on FreeBSD. It's definitely old school, but then I cut my teeth on NeXTSTEP, SunOS 4, and Slackware Linux, so rc-style init scripts feel pretty natural to me.

As for documentation, I cannot tell you how many times I've wanted to run "man something" only to find out I need to install the -doc package. (Also, I cannot tell you how many times I've wanted to compile something, only to find out I need to install the -dev package.) Compared to Linux, FreeBSD has superior documentation. Even kernel bits get manual pages, and not just syscalls in section 2, but kernel interfaces and modules in section 4.

Of course I use both FreeBSD and Linux to great effect at home and at work, as well as Windows and Solaris. I just _like_ FreeBSD better.