I’ve used a number of BSDs and it always comes down to hardware/software support.<p>FreeBSD only recently got 802.11ac support and iirc it’s limited to certain Intel chipsets. I’ve had issues will all sorts of hardware on NetBSD from NICs to eMMC storage and DragonflyBSD just seems to lag behind FreeBSD (the main developer is a really nice guy though). I haven’t done much with OpenBSD, because some of its features are off putting too me. I did actually make a very minor contribution to the FreeBSD kernel some years ago to get a NIC working, but most issues I’ve had were much more involved.<p>I know that there’s some emulation for Linux software, I haven’t tried to myself, so I cant speak too much on it.<p>I do like the ports system. I was able to get CDE running on FreeBSD trivially, which I cannot say for Linux.
BSDs lost mindshare due to AT&T's litigation about the intellectual property of Unix.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc....</a>.<p>Linux filled in the gap left by the litigation.<p>I don't know how "cathedral-like" the development of the BSDs is / was (vs. the "bazaar" of Linux.)
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar</a> may have some relevance.
I got into the Linux habit in 1993. From time to time I tried installing some kind of BSD. Occasionally the install worked, but frequently it didn't. (The same has been true about Red Hat Linux since 2005 or so)<p>It's not clear to me why I should switch away from Linux. The switching cost is real, but the benefits are obscure if they exist at all.