Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Yep, installed my first Linus Distro in primary school at about 11 yo. Now I am 23.

In all seriousness while I think FreeBSD and GhostBSD are very cool, and have some interesting server applications they do have some annoying limitations. It's not really their fault either, it sucks being the 4th most common platform/kernel/whatever. The FreeBSD people seem less uptight about working with proprietary software as it's not the same kind of Open Source Linux is because it's not copyleft. So you can use their code wherever even in closed source products. They include things like Nvidia drivers straight in their repos.

As for what makes them different/interesting: Linux is very capable but also kind of over engineered, confusing, and somewhat jank. BSDs are generally more simple. You would think this makes them less capable but aside from software support they often have more useful features. BSDs had Jails before Containers where supported properly on Linux.

BSD is almost what Linux is to Windows: faster, more stable, less annoying, and with a fraction of the users, hardware and software support. It's also a bit more complex to do certain things out of the box - though GhostBSD does give you a GUI and decent installer.

Also BTRFS on Linux feels like this:

Child: "Can we have ZFS?"

Mother: "We have ZFS at home."

ZFS at home: BTRFS

Like it's good that it exists, a lot better than other OSes had for a while, but it just doesn't compare to the stability and performance of the original. There are some areas where it's a bit more flexible and that can be useful, but generally it's just not as good. Pretty much Linux, then Apple, then Microsoft all tried copying ZFS, only worse. Heck it actually came from Sun Microsystems, then got Open Sourced allowing the FreeBSD people among others to port it to their system. Linux now has BCacheFS which might be even better but it's too early to tell.

Sorry for the long response. Thought I would explain some stuff while I am here.

There are some BSDers that unironically consider Linux too mainstream.

Or ~~pirated stuff~~ other legally aquired media

I tried that method. It's seriously borked if you ever want transcoding to work. Jellyfin has a customized version of ffmpeg they used that just dosen't exist on FreeBSD to the best of my knowledge. You can maybe make it work with the FreeBSD version but it would be an ugly hack.

Hi, I am currently on GhostBSD but that could change so I didn't want to be too specific in the post. I have tried installing spotify the way you suggest and it just crashes before I can get to a login screen. Do you think there is a way to make it work?