I wonder how Dragonfly BSD defaults compare.
Dragonfly has superior architecture, performance and security, despite its much smaller team. It is a textbook example of how a small team of focused competent engineers will deliver higher quality than an heterogeneous large body of developers with no focus. They are actually scaling in a manner competitive with Linux, unlike the other BSDs.
When Matt left Freebsd, which was due to a conflict that spawned over bad technical decisions, many good developers followed him.
What was left did implicitly support bad decisions. Fine-grained locks for SMP do explode complexity and makes writing quality code that much harder. It is also a problem in Linux, which compensates with sheer manpower.
Freebsd has been a cesspool since then. Jesus, what a mess Freebsd has become.
It would also be good to read about Dragonfly's exploit mitigations. Are these documented somewhere?
I know there have been new CPU vulnerabilities found past these, but I haven't been keeping track closely.
It would help if they had an announce mailing list. Looking at older release notes seems to be a manner of digging through the users list, or guessing URLs based on the current release notes. They seem in dire need of a maintainer for the website.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD#Release_history