Back then, in the view of the team I was working on, a custom compiled-from-source operating system like Free BSD 5.x or 6.x was superior to a Linux binary release.

Package managers like YUM and APT were not as good.

I kindly ask those of you, dear Archers, who are familiar with Free BSD (or perhaps other BSDs), to name relative pros and cons of both solutions, perceived by you.

Especially all the possible advantages of BSDs over Arch or Linux in general are of interest to me.

While they haven’t caught the fancy of the mainstream tech press, the BSDs are known for their robustness, reliability and security and are fairly popular with system administrators.That said, you can slap popular open source apps on top and use BSDs for everyday desktop computing tasks, such as browsing the web, listening to music, watching DVDs, playing games and reading PDFs.Also of note is their devoted community of developers and users.Free BSD was a great choice for a maintainable, secure, free open source UNIX-like OS with tight source control and frequent updates.Most people do not understand why Free BSD remains a great choice for security and stability.