> 1. Where do you use FreeBSD? On your laptop? Remote servers? Routers?

Right now, I run FreeBSD on a few machines: my rented server, my two home servers which also do redundant PPPoE + NAT, a NAT machine at my MIL's that I also use for offsite backup of my home servers (I don't trust the rented server enough to run backups there), additionally, I have two mini PCs setup to run mythtv frontend (but the backend is not currently running, because our tv habits have changed). My desktops are Windows. My wireless access points and I think my managed network switches are Linux, so is the ISP provided DSL modem and LTE to network device (which I believe also runs embedded Android on the actual modem). I do have an old acer chromebook that boots FreeBSD, but I haven't used it in a while (my son used it for minecraft until an update changed a library and made it too hard to get working)

2. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of Linux?

I had great experiences with FreeBSD at Yahoo and WhatsApp, and bad experiences with systemd when Debian adopted it, so I decided to switch. And I've been mostly happy. Going between Yahoo and WhatsApp, I jumped about three major versions of FreeBSD in a weekend, and everything felt the same, but better. Jumping between major releases of Debian, lots of things feel different and sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes the same; I felt a lot of major changes I was dealing with were complicating my system to deal with use cases I didn't care about, and that a lot of the worse offenders were coming from the same developers and I was tired of dealing with their software and tired of trying to get things to work without it.

3. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD or another *BSD?

IMHO, FreeBSD is focused on being practical and also has a performance focus. OpenBSD has a very opinionated security focus, which I apprechiate, but features needed for performance are missing and unlikely to arrive; I'm more willing to compromise security than performance, so there you go. I mentally associate NetBSD with portability, but I'm not running FreeBSD on exotic equipment, and not interested in fighting with my embedded Linux devices to get them to run software of my choice: been there, done that, I'd rather tilt at different windmills now.

4. Do you find something lacking in FreeBSD? Is there something that is good in another OS that you'd like to see in FreeBSD?

Hardware support is hit or miss. I have usb 2.5G nics I can't use that I thought I'd be able to (but didn't check, and I have other uses for, so no big deal). HDMI audio on certain generations of intel chips is difficult because the graphics and audio drivers need to coordinate on clock settings, but there's no mechanism for that in FreeBSD, the Linux gpu driver is shimmed into the FreeBSD kernel, so that makes it trickier than it maybe already was. I had trouble getting FreeBSD installed on the chromebook I mentioned originally, but it did get fixed.

Not having a large user community makes it hard for hardware/software providers to get excited about providing support, because they don't get a sense of return on investment.

5. What is that one thing about FreeBSD that you would hate to lose if you were forced to use another OS?

Stability of experience. I know that 90-95% of the skills and knowledge I develop on FreeBSD will apply to future releases. I've had to learn firewalls on Linux three times (of course, FreeBSD also has three firewalls, but they are all supported and all kind of different; I simultaneously use pf, because of pfsync which provides for seamless NAT failover and ipfw to do traffic shaping and network delay simulstions; I've never used ipf, but I assume it provides value to some), and I work with mixed versions of Linux for work and have to deal with sometimes ip, sometimes ifconfig, sometimes netstat, sometimes ss on a regular basis, and it makes no sense. FreeBSD has the same needs for interface config and routing and socket listing, and made the existing tools do it, rather than new tools that work the same but different. Who has time for that? If FreeBSD ends, which I don't expect it to, I'll just go live in a cave with the final release and the best computer I can put together that's supported by the final release, and that will be my computing for the rest of my time. Honestly, while I sure computing will continue to develop, a big beefy box purchased today should get me a long time of continued use, so I'll be fine. When it falls apart, maybe there will be a retro marketplace, or maybe I'll move to assisted living.