Not very practical, but good for understanding the OS: Everything is a file. Even your filesystem and harddrive is represented by a file (devicenode).

Back in the day, before things such as pulseaudio and equivalents became the norm, there was also such a file (it might still exist, idk) for your soundcard. By shoving the contents of a wav file directly into /dev/dsp, you could hear it as if it was played normally.

Unrelates to the above, in a terminal context it’s very handy to learn the concepts of STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR, and how to manipulate these. I won’t go into it here, but whenever you see a bunch of commands strung together with redirects, < > | >>, that’s usually for sending the output (STDOUT) of one command somewhere else, such as to the input STDIN to another command.

I’ve always been intrigued by that one. I want to test it out, but finding an image has proven difficult.

I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.

I miss an /etc structure that wasn’t a complete mess.

I miss UFS and its soft updates.

I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.

I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.

And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.

The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I’ve only needed to use fBSD once professionally.

I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.

One word: snapd

If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.

Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I’m sure it’s good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it’s a lot less flamboyant about it.