BSD is a port of Unix to the PC.
Linux is a unix-like emulator for the PC.
Splitting of hairs for the most part. /etc/rc.d/* vs inittab, jail vs virtualization, no run levels. In the end though csh works like csh on both platforms.
BSD would be just harder to maintain. Desktop builds such as PCBSD are a far cry from the user experience you get with modern linux distros.
FreeBSD was the mainstay of colocated machines back in the 90’s when everyone was running a DikuMUD. RedHat started making headway around 1999 or so.
Building up Centos minimal installs is what I’ve always done for deployed projects too. However the fact that ‘stable’ means things installed via yum and the Centos repo are a year behind gets aggravating. Often having to build things from source.
For development at home I choose Fedora for this very reason.
