This blog by Vermaden is probably one of the most cited in the FreeBSD community when someone in a forum/subreddit asks why FreeBSD. I think it does a good job encapsulating the reasons one would choose FreeBSD over Linux or other OS’s.
I’ve become more partial to the *BSD’s in the past couple of years and respect what each one brings. I do daily drive Debian tho ;)
On Linux, it’s nice to separate installations made with and without the package manager. For example, the package manager can install sshd binary at /usr/bin/sshd but if for some reason I manually compile and install it, I can install it at /usr/local/bin/sshd.
On freebsd it looks like the package manager (pkg) is installing packages in /usr/local. Is it possible to have a separation like the one I described above?
ooof…that’s one I don’t know off the top of my head…it might be possible using the ports tree (aka building from source) rather than using pkg. Also, what is the use case for doing that? Answering that will help to figure out how to do it on BSD vs linux,
Try asking on the freebsd forums or at unitedbsd.com if you can’t get any help here.
Use case is as I said separating the prefix that is used by your package manager vs. what you are installing your manually compiled stuff in. It helps in avoiding conflicts between your manually installed stuff and the binaries and libraries installed by your package manager.
FreeBSD allows you to compile your own software from souce, which should allow you to choose where you install it…Gentoo’s portage is based off of FreeBSD. Also, pkgsrc is available to you. https://www.pkgsrc.org/