> I can't give up Debian's package system, though
Why not? What would you miss from it?
Why not? What would you miss from it?
What really does my head in is that a default Debian install can pull down 2 megabytes a second from a server over SFTP, and a default FreeBSD 10 server can only do ~800 kilobytes per second (FreeBSD 9 was worse).
Shouldn't be that much of a difference. You might try OpenSSH from ports, maybe the HPN patches will help if you're on a high latency connection.