| 1. On my desktop. 2. As of right now, mostly curiosity. I have dabbled in FreeBSD on and off for years, and every time I install something from scratch I give it another go. In addition, the experience is more cohesive and "it just works" compared to almost every Linux distro I've ever used (the closest I've found is Slackware.) Let me explain. When I say cohesive, I mean mostly that it has extremely well thought out documentation, and most common things you might want to do are in the FreeBSD handbook. Just go to the relevant chapter and read up. When I say "it just works", I don't mean that the out of the box experience is just magically perfect and pre-configured like you might see on Windows or Ubuntu. What I mean is, the ports (and the pre-compiled packages made from them) are extremely reliable. You install them, and they work. Not to pick on Ubuntu specifically, but I have found this not to be the case more often on Ubuntu. Sometimes you install a package on Ubuntu, and it doesn't just work, and you might have to hunt down a config file to make some adjustments, its location may or may not be different from vanilla and may or may not be documented, or maybe it's a bad package and you're SOL. Furthermore, I've found that upgrading ports and packages in FreeBSD doesn't break things anywhere near as often as on most Linux distros I've used. It's very reliable in that sense, and it just works. 3. This is older hardware for personal use, and I don't really need the enhanced security of OpenBSD, especially the enhanced security that comes with a performance cost. As for NetBSD or DragonflyBSD, I have the impression, which may or may not be correct, that FreeBSD has better hardware support than either of them, and I want all of my peripherals to work. 4. I do most of my gaming on dedicated hardware these days (Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch), but it would be super great if the experience of playing games was more smooth. Thanks to the magic of Linux binary compatibility and Proton, you can totally play Windows and Linux games on FreeBSD with decent success, but the process of setting that up is awkward and ad-hoc. 5. See 2. Also, I like ZFS a lot, and I get the impression that getting up and running with ZFS on Linux is more of a hassle. |