[krylon]

That, in a nutshell, is what I - and no doubt many others - appreciate deeply about FreeBSD. Getting it to do what you want may not be trivial, but once you got it working, it stays that way. (The same can be said about OpenBSD and NetBSD, too, with the caveat that the OpenBSD developers do not put such a premium on backward compatibility.)

Relative to Windows, this is what I like about GNU/Linux, too. I used to work as an admin/helpdesk monkey, taking care of ~75 users and about 10 servers. And things would randomly break all the time. Having used mostly Linux and BSD in my private life for more than a decade at the time, I constantly found myself wondering how people can live like this. FWIW, on Debian and openSUSE, I had no trouble with things breaking randomly except on Tumbleweed. But there, it's usually just a question of rolling back to the latest snapshot, waiting for a week or so and running the upgrade again.