It’s kind of funny, Debian was my distro of choice since I was 15, so about 10 years up until last year. I still envy its huge application ecosystem. But over time I’ve come to really appreciate simplicity and the principle of least astonishment.

I originally started Sylve with an OpenWRT/LFS mindset since I had a lot of experience there. But even then, Linux often feels a bit cobbled together. ZFS is awkward because of the GPL vs CDDL situation, userland and kernel development feel disconnected, and there are so many different ways to do the same thing. I won’t even get into systemd, you get the idea.

What really clicked for me was using a system where the kernel and userland are developed together. That cohesion makes a big difference. Technically, I was able to rely almost entirely on the base OS without pulling in extra dependencies, aside from libvirt to make migration easier and Samba for file sharing.

Going forward, Sylve leans into that even more. PF for the firewall, the rock solid iSCSI implementation in base, even things like smart(8) written by src committers just feel more consistent and thought through.

So yeah, Debian definitely wins on features and applications. But for me, FreeBSD wins on coherence and design.