[heathjohns]

While you're right in terms of technical prowess, there absolutely is a use case for BSD: it has a distinct culture with different values.

There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct.

Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them.

In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.