it actually is because that means we effectively have 3 Os (mac windows linux) 2 of which are completely unusable for any privacy minded individual plus bsd is more intuitive than linux but thats just imo
I mean I don't use nor ever plan on using BSD systems and disagree with their philosophy quite a bit but I think them dying is overall bad for the open source community.
I'm quite fond of my fbsd laptop. Wifi is a bit clunky, but it never bothered me. Full wayland-niri desktop works well, and there are pretty cool virtualization features.
I used OpenBSD on servers for years. I don't think it's suited as a daily driver, especially not with a desktop. I absolutely love pf and miss it dearly, though. iptables and nftables are utter shit compared to the glory that is pf. Yes, there is some hyperbole in that statement, but only some.
From my little experience with working on BSD Servers, BSD is very reliable and for my use cases fast enough. But the slower updates and lack of most Wi-Fi support and sometimes spotty hardware support combined with the need for porting a lot of Linux software that dose not natively run on BSD is a deal breaker for using BSD on my Main Desktop Computer.
TLDR: For me BSD is a powerful tool that has a very specific job that is not being a Desktop Computer.
In juniper networking hardware. And many others. If you have the capability to create what's missing (drivers etc) it will work well. If you do not, well, there's shit tons of drivers for Linux.
I've been using FreeBSD for 20 years on my desktop. I've been also mainly using it because I was literally afraid of using Linux filesystems for data storage, when I learned how ZFS works.
Now with bcachefs the situation is different. It's nice to see an advanced filesystem on Linux, even it's still beta. I migrated my desktop to Linux, but will keep FreeBSD on my servers for a while, because it's less hassle for me.
Actually I stopped liking the FreeBSD community. They made a lot of drama in the past years and I stopped being active there. I haven't reported bugs anymore and fixed them privately or reported directly to upstream. I have many nice things running on servers, but I'm thinking about moving to Debian entirely.
I personally have tried FreeBSD and some FreeBSD "distros" on the desktop, and have used *BSD-based stuff as servers/single-purpose machines.
As a desktop system (user-centric use case), you notice how hardware support is sometimes problematic, especially on laptops. I personally had problems with NVIDIA GPUs, already a problem on Linux, being a big problem here as well, and don't mention WiFi (FreeBSD doesn't support 802.11ac and up currently) or Bluetooth. Software-wise, if your applications do not have a *BSD version, well, then you are relying on Linux ports, which for desktop use isn't exactly great.
But, in servers/headless setups, *BSDs are shining, with the most important things running rock-solid, stable and resource-friendly.
