I had a fairly large config and kept running into problems with speed. I gave up late last year and tried doom and haven't looked back. Very fast compared to what I had hobbled together.
I been daily driving FreeBSD for the last 3 or 4 years. I was frustrated by a lot of things in Linux at the time, no this wasn't just because of systemd. I don't actually mind systemd on my desktop.
Everything was very easy much like Debian maybe to get going. There's over 10,000 ports most are in package form at any time. Sometimes the build process fails and a package goes away for a short time, but you can always install it via ports.
My biggest gripe is and always will be the fact I can't use my spotify account on my FreeBSD desktop. I don't see this ever changing though. What I have done is gone back to relying on my local music collection a bit more again. I also bluetooth stream spotify from my phone to my receiver, but I'm lazy, hate phones, and don't generally like to do this.
It also has easiest operating system upgrade path out there that I have experienced. Just freebsd-update, reboot, done.
Jails are great, but they need work to be a bit more modern at this point. Docker has kinda showed some type of image repository is a nice feature. I'm not sure we'll see this right away, but BastilleBSD is working on some nice jails based solutions. Based off of FreeBSD, i'm pretty excited to possibly use this in the future.
In my experience asking questions on irc is pretty much useless. A lot of times you just get try hard's they don't even understand what you are trying to do that are determined they know more than you about what you are doing. It's just frustrating. If I got a question I typically just sit on it for a day two, and figure it out or ask on a forum. As far as chat, I much prefer something like rocketchat/slack/mattermost because of the embedded data that comes with it. A friend posts a funny YouTube video I just click play I don't have to load open a browser and navigate to the link. When someone posts a link you get meta data with the link so you can decide if you want to click it or not. It's more streamlined that way IMO. IRC could easily integrate this stuff but development of the standard hasn't really progressed that I have seen.
I been a mattermost user for two years, can't say enough good things about it. Love that it's written in go. We run ours with very little resources and it still chugs along.
Why does any of that truly matter? What matters most is if it meets the needs of people using the product, not what language it is written in nor how it is deployed.
Usually easier to administrate & upgrade than a mess of script files & packages. Especially if you're not in whatever "scene" that junk's from (e.g. you're an iOS developer, mostly, not a Javascript person used to dealing with npm crap, or a Python person used to PIP crap, or a Ruby person used to gem crap, or whatever crap it may be). Download file for correct arch, run file. You can confidently use it even if you're not familiar with Go at all. Even if you hack on it and make your own builds, the deployment story's nice & simple because deployment target images or VMs or devices usually don't need anything but the binary and maybe a service definition file or startup script of some kind (which everything else also needs anyway, so not like that's any worse). No having to make sure npm's installed, then use it to install some native package that needs to build some C deps for the given environment, set the right Python environment, check the Ruby version, none of that junk.
[EDIT] In short, I guess, the nice thing about running services written in go is that, unlike a lot of other popular ecosystems, you actually can forget about what it's written in, more often than not.
If it's used in a small company, one of the users will also be deploying and administering it and integrating it with whatever else the company has. So things like what it's written in, matter.
Fairly anecdotal but feature breakages usually more common in Node apps than Go, it does "matter:most" for end users. It's not because of Node itself but the sheer amount of npm packages what's responsible for those.
the DF UI is a big "fuck you and fuck you again in yo face" design. this is coming from vim/emacs user (no probs with modality, long chords, etc). also coming from a user, who gladly enjoys text only games. But for DF a good UI is a necessity, or else it gets in your way. Your fun and productivity is obsctructed by the UI, most of gameplay is focused on navigating through UI, not playing.
my 2ct ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also why I find Factorio so enjoyable - when you can zoom out and admire your creation acting for a while. If you zoom out in DF your eyes start to bleed.
