My homelab has evolved significantly over the years. Currently, it’s a mix of heavy iron and efficient ARM devices, all orchestrated with Ansible. The Fleet Mars (TrueNAS): The primary storage engine. Bulk ZFS datasets, backups, and media library. Saturn (FreeBSD 15): The CI/CD Core. Runs Gitea, Woodpecker, and DNS. Jupiter (FreeBSD 15): The heavy lifter. Runs local storage and media services. OPNsense: The perimeter. Handling the network, firewall rules, and VLANs. Pluto (FreeBSD 14): My dedicated test box. Sunshine (Synology DS418): Secondary backup server to Mars. Venus (Linux/Fedora): For the few things that absolutely refuse to run on FreeBSD (yet). PiAware: ADS-B flight tracker (built following this guide). Pibox (Linux/ARM64): My low-power, always-on utility box. Everything is managed via Ansible stored in a private Gitea repo. Secrets are vaulted. Deployment is a single playbook run.

I use both. I like both. But they feel very different. Linux feels like a bazaar. You grab a kernel here, a package manager there, a init system from over there (usually systemd these days), and stitch it together. It’s powerful, chaotic, and moves fast. FreeBSD feels like a cathedral (to borrow the classic metaphor). The OS is a complete, cohesive unit. The kernel and userland are developed together. ifconfig works the same way it did 20 years ago. ZFS is a first-class citizen, not an external module. ...