Comment by lycopodiopsida

> Besides that there is a bigger question that I need to answer for myself: given the quirks of FreeBSD, what actually would the benefit of using it be?

I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.