Words cannot describe how easy FreeBSD
packagement package management has become recently.
They're finally pushing precompiled binaries with their apt/yum-like pkg tool (no man page yet).
pkg install thing
pkg delete thing
pkg update
pkg upgrade
etc...
(which are superior to older tools like pkg_{install,delete,update,upgrade} etc...)
But they haven't entirely ditched ports. Instead, they made a repository tool (poudriere) that makes building custom repositories child's play. This tool of course revolves around ports.
Poudriere uses a combination of ports and jails (VMs) to build and package applications and places them into a folder that is immediately ready to be served over NFS or HTTP and accessed with pkg. It's very easy to configure, the tool will actually download a FreeBSD image, sync the ports tree and build ports into packages with your own specified compile-time options (if any).
Here's a tutorial of someone building a KMS-specific repository (which I had to do for one of my Intel-based machines):
http://negativo17.org/freebsd-10-new-x-org-kms-pkgng-poudriere/That's remarkably easy! (EDIT: There's no need to build the kernel and world now)
It's certainly an improvement in practicality. FreeBSD can now probably be setup and configured in a comparable amount of time as any Linux distribution minus the pre-installed components (FreeBSD is not pre-installed with anything).
Anyway, if you ever cared to try something like FreeBSD, wait another a month for FreeBSD 10 to be released and give it a spin. It should be orders of magnitude easier and less time consuming to setup.
EDIT: Spelling.
