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In my experience, the BSDs used to be trusted for their reliability and performance. Linux has come a long way in terms of reliability and configuration cost - though performance is harder to tune for. Docker has enabled a lot of trusted deployments. 6-8 years ago I remember the question "Why don't companies use Linux as much in production as FreeBSD?"

Maybe I'm sheltered.

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I was in devops in a Dotcom in the 1999-2000 era. Back then Linux was still a pretty shaky server OS. In particular the network and NFS stacks were unstable and slow. We originally tried to deploy on Linux but had to switch to FreeBSD to get a stable environment.

But Linux has come a long way since then. The major issues have been resolved and IMO the overwhelmingly larger ecosystem Linux enjoys outweighs most if not all advantages FreeBSD might still have on a technical level.

However much I hate the politics surrounding Docker and systemd, they have done a LOT for Linux to provide a standardized way to configure most distros and reliably deploy apps/stacks. I still feel that tuning Linux for networking is not an easy thing to learn about.

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