I started with Solaris, moved to OpenIndiana, then to FreeBSD (the last over ten years ago). FreeBSD is hands-down the best. (I have a few Debian servers for other purposes but contemplate moving them to FreeBSD as well.)
I have experienced too many other benefits to NixOS (and learned enough Nix to get by along the way) to turn back now.
It now seems like the only way to do Linux sanely to me.
It’s perfect for tinkerers like me due to having more supported packages than any other distro, plus instant rollbacks.
It would be like asking a functional programmer to go back to C. “But… I’d lose all my guarantees, and spend too much time troubleshooting crap that just would never happen in [functional language/NixOS] again… No thanks”
To some things, there’s simply no turning back… and Nix is (slowly but steadily) gaining marketshare and mindshare for this reason.
If the BSD’s want future relevance, they better steal some ideas from Nix quick, and get cracking with declarative immutability and deterministic builds
Those things are cool... but I don't need them. I suspect many of us don't.
I like BSD's simplicity, consistency, and its native integration with ZFS. I don't know about deterministic builds but I suspect it does that without making a big deal, since everything can arrive via ports.
Linux, as much as I love it, is a rat's nest of different ideas and the inconsistency between distributions makes me want to pull my hair out. I care less about how it does things, and more that I only have to learn one system to understand each component -- as opposed to the mess that is init.d vs systemd vs upstart or whatever.
man pages are good but the FreeBSD Handbook is better.
One thing I’ve learned after crossing the 50 year mark is that time is actually the most valuable thing we have (and, most egalitarianly, everyone starts out with more or less the same amount of it left). So while troubleshooting can be enjoyable to many, time spent troubleshooting any issue that would simply be impossible to encounter in an alternative system is expensive indeed.
Underrated fact: The Nix repo has the largest number of supported packages of any Linux distro (my guess is that since everything is deterministically built "from the metal" more or less, that this results in far fewer needs for support and troubleshooting)
Not sure what apps you are running but everything I have wanted to install on it either compiled from source, compiled from ports, or has a package, without too much hassle. (Worst thing was having to type 'cmake' instead of 'make' for building llama.cpp)
BSD has its issues, for sure, but on the question of ZFS support it is stellar.
