I develop primarily on FreeBSD (80% C, 20% nodejs) and test for compliance on Centos Linux. My experience is that code written and tested on FreeBSD has so far fewer bugs this way. Package management is more intuitive, too.
Linux package managers are fast, but usually broken silently in some ways - which are critical on robustness - and I always discover myself manually doing what port system does.
CentOS packages are relatively more robust, but it's too outdated, and installing new packages nothing different from any other Linux distros.
I see the FreeBSD devs have finally started to see the light with the introduction of Pkgng.
Pkgng is not a replacement for ports.. It's a replacement for the old pkg manager (pkg_*)
Turned out to be a dodgy RAM stick in the end. ECC is a requirement for me now when the host machine supports it.
I use ports to mean compile on my own and packages to mean installing precompiled binaries. In my experience, FreeBSD seems more amenable to managing, building, and installing software from source code than a linux distribution. Perhaps I just haven't learned an efficient manner that integrates well with yum/rpm on CentOS? I've always had more dependency nightmares on a linux distro than with FreeBSD. Using FreeBSD's ports collection (single repository) has been less error prone for me than trying to manage all the different yum repos one must manually organize to get up to date software. Am I doing something wrong or is it really that clunky?
I'm not advocating against FreeBSD, I like FreeBSD and I want to see it again on the table, but the ports are hurting it and its adoption, it needs to go away.