I’ve never used any BSDs directly, only in the shape of opnSense, but as a fan of Gentoo, which uses portage, that, in turnm is heavily inspired by the ports system, I should probably give one of them a go at some point.
My biggest deterrent so far has been lower performance compared to linux. I objectively understand it’s imperceptible in every day use, but something at the back of my head has been holding me back.
OOB, FreeBSD will always be slower. You need to compile a custom kernel using only the hardware on your system. After that, it exceeds Linux perf.
Is that still true comparing to a custom kernel for linux?
If not better, equal. But without doing this, the BSD kernel is bloated.