[h4waii]

How is a non-tangible filesystem making you "literally" bulletproof?

The BSDs are great for very specific tasks, but I find more general use users will prefer Linux with GNU userland. It has wider hardware support and a larger community for resources such as documentation and troubleshooting.

[vermaden]

Please read about ZFS Boot Environments, no matter if from Oracle documentation or Illumos one, You will get the idea what it provides. There is beadm command same as in Solaris/Illumos and You can select BE at boot in the FreeBSD bootloader.

In short the idea is that You create snapshot (BE) of the current system state (filesystems), then make changes/upgrades. If something went wrong, then You reboot to that snapshot (BE) like nothing had happened.

About GNU userland, I also use SOME GNU tools like 'gls' (GNU ls) or 'gawk' (GNU awk). They are provided by the FreeBSD sysutils/coreutils package/port, I also use sysutils/moreutils like 'vipe' or 'vidir'.

The documentation part on FreeBSD is much better then on Linux, check the Handbook, or Wiki, or FAQ, or plain old MAN PAGES with useful examples. I sometimes read/use ARCH Linux wiki or Gentoo WIKI but for most of the time FreeBSD documentation is second to none. Even with a lot less people then Linux has.

BTW, while there are a lot more Linux people out there then BSD people, remember that Linux people are fragmented over about thousand Linux distributions while there are only several BSD distributions.

I do not want to sound 'bad' here but I also found many times that 'BSD people' known more about Linux then 'Linux people' if You know that I mean.

Regards, vermaden

[JdeBP]

... and yet, despite that, the doco for the BSDs is often better quality than the Linux doco. It hasn't actually turned out in practice that the larger community results in the better doco.