I have essentially the same take. The sysadmin at my company prefers FreeBSD for all these reasons (as such that's what we're running), and he's engaged me a tonne about FreeBSD but all I see is an operating system that's just as good as the other mainstream server Linux distributions. Except now we've got a system that's more difficult to hire for. "Any competent admin can learn it easily" is something I've been told but how many will want to when they could easily go their whole career without encountering it again?
I like your point about Docker vs Jails, I haven't seen it discussed like that before. I keep hearing Jails are more secure than anything else, I'll have to read more into it.
As far as the networking goes, I haven't seen any recent benchmarks to substantiate those claims either. However, considering Netflix uses FreeBSD on their edge nodes and has put a lot of work into the upstream to improve networking (among other things), it wouldn't surprise me if it's technically superior to the Linux stack. Clearly though Linux's networking isn't an issue for most organizations.
And regarding ZFS, ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD's ZFS implementation are now one and the same. It would be nice to see some of the big distributions(or even the Linux kernel) integrate it more directly. This is probably a solid point in favor of FreeBSD, but it's not like it doesn't work in Linux. I'm not a systems guy, so I'm probably out of the loop on this, but Proxmox is the only distribution I've seen with ZFS as a filesystem out of the box, but I don't know how much production use Proxmox sees. I only run it on my home server.
All that to basically say, I like FreeBSD conceptually. I'm just still not convinced that it's doing enough things better to warrant using it over a common Linux distribution for general computing purposes.
I like your point about Docker vs Jails, I haven't seen it discussed like that before. I keep hearing Jails are more secure than anything else, I'll have to read more into it.
As far as the networking goes, I haven't seen any recent benchmarks to substantiate those claims either. However, considering Netflix uses FreeBSD on their edge nodes and has put a lot of work into the upstream to improve networking (among other things), it wouldn't surprise me if it's technically superior to the Linux stack. Clearly though Linux's networking isn't an issue for most organizations.
And regarding ZFS, ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD's ZFS implementation are now one and the same. It would be nice to see some of the big distributions(or even the Linux kernel) integrate it more directly. This is probably a solid point in favor of FreeBSD, but it's not like it doesn't work in Linux. I'm not a systems guy, so I'm probably out of the loop on this, but Proxmox is the only distribution I've seen with ZFS as a filesystem out of the box, but I don't know how much production use Proxmox sees. I only run it on my home server.
All that to basically say, I like FreeBSD conceptually. I'm just still not convinced that it's doing enough things better to warrant using it over a common Linux distribution for general computing purposes.