[laumars]

If you're comfortable with Debian then you shouldn't have too many issues with FreeBSD as there is a lot of transferable knowledge between the two (FreeBSD even supports a lot of GNU flags which most other UNIXes don't).

Plus FreeBSD has a lot of good documentation (and the forums have proven a good resource in the past too) - so you're never going it alone (and obviously you have the usual mailing groups and IRC channels on Freenode).

While I do run quite a few Debian (amongst other Linux) I honestly find my FreeBSD server to be the most enjoyable / least painful platform to administrate. Obviously that's just personal preference, but I would definitely recommend trying FreeBSD to anyone considering ZFS.

[jspiros]

As far as I'm concerned, the most identifiable characteristic of Debian is the packaging system, dpkg/apt. I've used FreeBSD occasionally, and that's what I always end up missing about Debian. I did consider going with Nexenta or Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, but whatever, ZoL works well enough. :)

[laumars]

FreeBSD 10 has switched to a new package manager, so it might be worth giving it another look next time you're bored and fancy trying something new.

I can understand your preference though. I'm not a fan of apt much personally, but pacman is one of the reasons I've stuck with ArchLinux over the years - despite it's faults :)

[jspiros]

I'll keep that in mind; I do sometimes find myself with some time to play with things. :)