To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system myself other than just for the sake of using something different and less mainstream. FreeBSD had some advantages in the past but nowadays Linux has caught up in features.
Now that I think of it, when I switched from DOS to Linux it was already because I found manpages amazing. Maybe I've just a soft spot for documentation.
Yes if raw performance is your top priority, linux wins. But for a desktop or general-purpose server, that's not the most important thing for me.
I see some reasons:
- the BSD license
- the system is composed of pieces written to work together, it is built from start up as a coherent operating system as opposed to things cobbled together like other UNIX-like OS-es do
incidentally, the requirement of the GPL is not to upstream your stuff, but to offer to make the modified source available to anyone you distribute the code to. Often the same in practice, but does not have to be.
I use FreeBSD+ZFS for storage servers. I definitely want to use ZFS for these and I don't think Linux+ZFS is as good a combination.
It depends on what you want to do. If you want a typical laptop with a desktop environment, then FreeBSD might not be a good choice. Horses for courses.
I'd love it if Gentoo/BSD were a thing once again, I like the BSD concepts but there's nothing like Portage on BSD so far - afaik pkgsrc is nowhere close to it.