I need to tinker less because there's no distro maintainers that constantly change stuff.
It did take a while to set it up but then it runs fine. I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works. I don't want to have to trust a commercial party to act in my best interests, because they don't. The current mess that is windows, full of ads and useless ai crap, mandatory telemetry, forced updates, constantly trying to sell their cloud services etc is a good example. FreeBSD doesn't do any of those things.
Most Linuxes don't either but there's still a lot of corpo influence. I feel like it's becoming a playing ball of big tech. You only need to see how many corp suits are on the board of the Linux foundation, how many patches are pushed by corp employees as part of their job etc. I don't want them to have that much influence over my OS. I don't believe in a win-win concerning corporate involvement in open-source.
FreeBSD has a little bit of that (netgate's completely botched wireguard is and example) but lessons are learned.
>no distro maintainers that constantly change stuff.
This is one of those things that mom-Linux people think but isn't really true. I can think of two episodes in the last decade (systemd and Wayland) that constituted controversial changes but frankly there are people who make "not using systemd" their entire identity and it's just so much cringe.
Even on a rolling release bleeding edge distro like Fedora things really don't change that much at all.
>I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works.
FreeBSD doesn't afford you any more or less control over how the system works than Linux.
> FreeBSD doesn't afford you any more or less control over how the system works than Linux.
And yet, I'm constantly patching and working around lib issues on Linux (on the desktop), but never with FreeBSD. That's the point being made. Linux is a lot of stuff mashed together to make a system, and it works really well, but FreeBSD is a collection of components carefully curated and maintained as one and works very, very well most of the time.
If Linux works for you, use it. No one is trying to convert you.
I have zero interest in tinkering with my operating system. I mostly want it to just get out of my way, which Linux does well 95% of the time.