I am in the middle of reading an extremely well written article about BSD and Linux...It is not a flame article, nor does it assert which one to use or any of that junk.  It mainly targets the Linux users but I am reading it to see a BSD user's perspective on Linux.

Get a cup of coffee/tea/soda and have a read (its a long article):
BSD for Linux Users

On the other hand, when I have time, I will load Gentoo on QEMU (as it resembles FreeBSD the most) and have a go at Linux.  No, I am not going to try Slackware or Debian or any of the other distributions.  I am going to try Gentoo because I will feel more at home with it, so don't bother to write which one I should use or not use.  The idea is to expose myself to Linux, not the various distributions ... and I want to do this cleanly, there is nothing clean or efficient about going to the most radically different system than what I am used to.

Hmm, I was told by several people, some time ago, that Slackware is the most BSD-like of the Unixes.  But they were probably wrong :)

[quote author=iago link=topic=12891.msg129187#msg129187 date=1127578606]
Hmm, I was told by several people, some time ago, that Slackware is the most BSD-like of the Unixes.  But they were probably wrong :)
[/quote]

Yes, and so do many Debian users...and they are probably wrong too!

Based on what TehUser tells me, who uses both Gentoo and FreeBSD...Gentoo appears to be nearly an exact replica of FreeBSD.  It has FreeBSD's minimalistic, more centralized nature as well as a similar ports system called Portage.  I wasn't aware Slackware had any of these features.  Just like FreeBSD, Gentoo emphasizes compilations over pre-packaged binaries, and from what I understand of how it installs itself (which is pushing it for practicality), it also has a similar way of building itself.  The only real difference besides the system and userland tools is that FreeBSD installs a precompiled version of itself while Gentoo compiles itself.  FreeBSD is much faster at deploying methinks...but in both cases, you're going to end up rebuilding world anyways on both systems.