Funny enough, I decided to play with FreeBSD for personal projects in 2020. I gave up and I am reverting all my servers to Linux in 2022, for the opposite of the reasons mentioned in this article.
* Lack of systemd. Managing services through shell scripts is outdated to me. It feels very hacky, there is no way to specify dependencies, and auto-restarts in case of crashes. Many FreeBSD devs praise launchd, well... systemd is a clone of launchd.
* FreeBSD jail are sub-optimal compared to systemd-nspawn. There are tons of tools to create freebsd jails (manually, ezjail, bastillebsd, etc…) half of them are deprecated. At the end all of your jails end up on the same loopback interface, making it hard to firewall. I couldn't find a way to have one network interface per jail. With Linux, debootstrap + machinectl and you're good to go.
* Lack of security modules (such as SELinux) -- Edit: I should have written "Lack of good security module"
* nftables is way easier to grasp than pf, and as fast as pf, and has atomic reloads.
* Lack of systemd. Managing services through shell scripts is outdated to me. It feels very hacky, there is no way to specify dependencies, and auto-restarts in case of crashes. Many FreeBSD devs praise launchd, well... systemd is a clone of launchd.
* FreeBSD jail are sub-optimal compared to systemd-nspawn. There are tons of tools to create freebsd jails (manually, ezjail, bastillebsd, etc…) half of them are deprecated. At the end all of your jails end up on the same loopback interface, making it hard to firewall. I couldn't find a way to have one network interface per jail. With Linux, debootstrap + machinectl and you're good to go.
* Lack of security modules (such as SELinux) -- Edit: I should have written "Lack of good security module"
* nftables is way easier to grasp than pf, and as fast as pf, and has atomic reloads.