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For me it was the ports system; they were a very cool idea at a first glance but when they broke.... and that did happen a lot. Then RHEL and clones came and that was the end of the FreeBSD for me: I could finally make system updates without heart palpitations and abi/api changes.

A proper package management system and binary packages might have saved FreeBSD in the data centre; maybe it could still do, though it's a very long shot now. It's a shame really...

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I started out with FBSD, moved on to OBSD, then Solaris 10. Finally got onto using RHEL and about the only thing I really miss from the BSD days are the man pages. The BSD teams really had excellent man pages compared to the Linux world. It's not as big a deal now with so much more info on the web, but concise, precise man pages are a really nice feature to have.

You might want to check out the new pkgng system, if you still care.

I still care, but pkgng doesn't seem to solve that problem. What solves some of the problem is Debian GNU/kFreeBSD; but that came a bit too late.

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