For a historical perspective ... way back in the day there was Unix at Bell Labs, and one of it's licensed derivatives was made by Berkeley Systems, and hence their distribution was called BSD.
Unix split into 2 main variants, BSD and System 5 Unix. Most commercial derivations were based on System 5, and BSD was used in academia.
A short time later Linus created his own System 5 Unix-inspired OS kernel, Linux, but from clean cloth, and distributed it with userspace tools borrowed from yet another OS project called GNU created by Richard Stallman.
The various BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, etc) are descendants of the original BSD.
People used to say BSD and it's children were "real" Unix and Linux was not, though I don't think many care about that anymore.
Well OpenBSD tends to attract OS minimalists. I went to the bother of learning OBSD when I started to get the impression that Linux might be headed towards some sort of complexity crisis. Initially simple servers were the target but I now have a desktop and a laptop on it as well.
Practically I don't really see BSD better, as Linux is more widely used in commercial spaces which means more readily available packages, more edge cases solved, more results on Google and more jobs.
But if you want to be educational and use the OS which invented OpenSSH, pf (firewall that is far easier to read than iptables) and many other useful tools, then you might want to give a go at OpenBSD. It's fun to run it as your home router.
If you want to try zfs without being awkward due to licensing concern and thus cannot be distributed from Linux vendors directly, then FreeBSD is a good choice.
NetBSD, I never tried but code seems clean to support quite a range of hardware platforms.
DragonflyBSD, is more like a research OS to innovate on new features.
BSD has a great firewall, it's usually more integrated than Linux (for certain definitions of "integrated"), and some argue that it's more secure/stable. Some argue that the BSD license is superior. Hardware support and software availability tend to be more hit-or-miss. N.B.: I do not use BSD.
I run my web servers using FreeBSD on Digital Ocean.
Not to get into a whole thing about it, but Linux just refers to the kernel; various groups package the kernel with user-land stuff to create distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, etc.
FreeBSD is a unified operating system that’s developed, tested and released as a unit; they take responsibility for the entire stack and architectures: amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, armv6, and aarch64.
In general, FreeBSD (and to my knowledge, the other BSDs) are very stable, memory efficient, supports high throughput, and are quite secure. Famously I suppose, Netflix runs their entire infrastructure on FreeBSD and contributes back lots of code. The base of Apple’s macOS is a FreeBSD variant called Darwin.
The narrative has been that FreeBSD is fabulous for servers and the like but not as good for desktops and laptops, due to it not having as broad driver support for the latest PC hardware. My understanding that’s starting to change with BSDs specifically focused on desktop use; see https://trueos.org.
> FreeBSD is a unified operating system that’s developed, tested and released as a unit
When people mention this, it doesn't mean Linux ships with a kernel and everyone putting random things on top but Linux is also rigorously tested by distribution vendors and are well streamlined throughout, so I don't think that's much of a selling point for BSD.
What matters for average users are that they can google their problems easily and they don't get hit by edge cases that they can't easily solve.
None of the UNIX except macOS are really good at desktop.
I will say something that is completely incorrect as facts, but helpful as a thought technology:
Choosing BSD over Linux is like choosing Slackware over Elementary. The differences are there, but they're very niche and subtle in the technical side and the philosophical side.
If you've never used a BSD, you can safely think of it as just another linux distro, and use the same reasoning you'd use to choose your favorite distro.
Do you need more specifics on which are those differences? Check out [1] and my own take on [2].
