[_delirium]

The package management is definitely what drove me away from FreeBSD in the early 2000s. BSD people loved ports, but my main recollection of it is that I spent a lot of time waiting for things to compile. A lot of time, hours in some cases. I liked how apt worked a lot better, both in terms of speed and the interface.

Nowadays, FreeBSD does actually have more apt-like package management, with a fairly simple high-level interface that installs prebuilt binary packages (properly resolving dependencies among them, etc.), called pkgng. I recently tried it again, and it's nice, exactly what I was missing at the time. NetBSD's story here is good today as well, with pkgin (the high-level interface to pkgsrc) also being quite nice, nice enough that I use it on OSX despite never having even run NetBSD (so I'm not using it on OSX because of a preexisting love of it) [1]. But 15 years ago, apt was clearly better, at least for my uses.

[1] I use it on OSX via Joyent's packages, https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/