I tried both as a teenager. At the time I ended up sticking with Linux, but even in retrospect it's hard to quantify why. I remember though that it felt more understandable and "approachable" somehow. It was little stuff like bash vs csh or the presence of ever so slightly more modern editors and utilities.
I think if FreeBSD would have put a bit more effort into modernization and community in the early to mid 90s we'd all be using it more now. It's guts were superior at the time and in a few ways still are.
There's not being modern, and then there's not chasing every rabbit down every hole. Right now I feel like FreeBSD is a wonderful mix of advanced, modern tech like ZFS and bhyve, married with an absence of "oooo-shiny!" misadventures like PulseAudio and systemd.
And in particular, right now I'm grateful that the BSDs are small enough to be ignored by the herds of people migrating away from Windows and bringing their mindsets with them - that all seems to be landing on Linux.
I wonder how much the reason they are landing on Linux is that there are multiple companies actively trying to pitch Linux to existing Windows users.
RH for instance seems to be heavily pitching RHEL (never mind Fedora and CentOS) towards corporate and the Military-Industrial complex. The latter in particular are interested in RHEL after some poor experience using Windows on warships and similar.
But at the same time there is a pile of MSCEs running around in these organizations, and so there is a incentive to make daily Linux management at least superficially similar to reduce retraining costs.
I had precisely the opposite experience. My father bought me RedHat 5.2 and no matter what I did, I could not get anything but a stuck X -- no mouse, no window manager, no login prompt. every time, just the immovable X.
Returned it for The Complete FreeBSD and never, ever looked back. FreeBSD got me jobs at interesting places, and a handful of life long, interesting friends.
I agree with some of the other replies here -- I'm perfectly happy and even glad the BSDs have exactly the size and composition of users they do.
well, NetBSD needs much more public love, in my opinion.
I think if FreeBSD would have put a bit more effort into modernization and community in the early to mid 90s we'd all be using it more now. It's guts were superior at the time and in a few ways still are.