> What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.

This! I didn't realize how much I wanted this. FreeBSD release base packages are stable but all the regular packages are super up to date. Plasma looks very updated and stable.

I've tried rolling distros like Opensuse Tumble and Manjaro but eventually if you don't update them regularly you get a huge change and often many things change/break. Had your bluetooth speakers working finally? Now that's gone!

On the other hand stable releases in linux distros also seem to fail. Didn't update your random Ubuntu server in the corner of the office for the last year? Well now the apt links are broken and down for the release so you can't update the current release so you can upgrade.

> I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.

It's nice, many of the same basics I learned on freebsd 6 years ago all still magically work. ifconfig works even with ipv6. You learn two files and you can do most anything.

I'm definitely gonna consider Freebsd for embedded devices if I can as well. You dint need buildroot or yocto as it's already part of the BSDs.

> You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.05";
    nixpkgs-unstable.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable"

:)

I said 'most' :) and it goes for most of the mainstream distros. I wouldn't consider nix that, due to the complex configuration. As a corporate admin I do like declarative management at work but for home no. Even though FreeBSD has some aspects of it (you can turn stuff on and off in rc.conf)