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I use NetBSD, so maybe one could change the final results from "6" to "7". It's too bad that someone spoiled the poll for everybody else.

That having been said, I like NetBSD for a lot of the reasons that FreeBSD people like their OS. NetBSD is a very clean install, (cleaner than fbsd, more like it's fork OpenBSD). pkgsrc (the NetBSD name for *BSD ports, the inspiration of Gentoo's famed "portage") rocks. pkgsrc tends to be easier to automate and more flexable than FreeBSD ports in many cases. (Though I do miss fbsd's portsupgrade; though that addition did mean that sometimes fbsd's portsupgrade database gets fouled up; making it have some of the disadvantages Linux has, though not as intractable. Of course, NetBSD has the "update" target, and tools like pkg_chk allow me to do the "update everything" dance of portupgrade.)

Everything just makes sense in NetBSD; for example, it puts packages in /usr/pkg rather than dumping everything in /usr/local, making the original usage of this for being admin installed programs difficult or impossible to do. It certainly does not put programs who knows where in Linux. (Yes, I know there's the FHS; but that sucks even those times it is adhered to.)

NetBSD also has a new init system (that was made part of FreeBSD in 5.0) that is better than either the traditional BSD inits or SySV inits.

Of course, /usr/pkg and the NetBSD rc.d init systems violate Unix tradition slightly, but this is natural for a non-dead OS like BSD. :-) Besides, NetBSD adheres to BSD Unix tradition most of the rest of the time. :-)

The documentation, which was mentioned a lot in the FreeBSD posts is doubly true for NetBSD. The man pages of NetBSD are excellent, probably among the best in the industry; and of course lightyears beyond the "this manpage is not maintained, read the info docs (which are only marginally better with the worst hypertext interface known to man)" nightmare of Linux.

The FreeBSD handbook I admit is a very very good source of tutorial documentation, the NetBSD guide contains a lot of useful "how to" newbie information not in the FreeBSD handbook however; though it has a long ways to go before it's as comprehensive as the fbsd handbook.

NetBSD's code is very well written, this is a side effect of it running on so many different architectures and the fact that code correctness is one of the project's official goals. Many of the traditional *nix tools are the best. For example lukemftp, though that has been ported to other *nix OSs since. Of course *they* don't get lukemftp automatically grabbing stuff as it does with pkgsrc. :-) (This is also more verbose than fbsd's fetch program, which is a plus for debugging if you ever need that. (Fewer stuff in pkgsrc seems to be broken than fbsd ports.)

I don't mean to flame FreeBSD, it's an excellent operating system. I just thought the comparisons were appropriate because more people from the *BSD world are familiar with FreeBSD than with NetBSD.

Speaking of interoperating-system comparisons, I'd like to note that two distributions percieved as the most hacker friendly Linuxes, Slackware and Gentoo, are the most BSD-like. This is no coincidence.