Dan - Which BSD?

Hi Allan and Kris,

First of all thanks a lot for this awesome show!

A bit about me: I'm actually a web developer, but I much prefer a clean, consistent system over anything else, so I migrated completely to Linux when Windows 8 came out. Then I got started with *BSD through GhostBSD some years ago, and also about then found out about BSDnow when you had just aired one of the very first episodes. Since then I have been watching the live stream for quite a while, enjoying the tutorials, and sometimes even joined in on IRC. Nowadays I'm listening to the recordings on my phone while traveling.
About two years ago I finally built my own NAS, powered by the sharky FreeNAS of course and serving my Android tablets through a Plex media server jail. I also set up a GitLab jail back then when GitLab wasn't yet in the ports tree and there was no plugin, but luckily someone had put a setup script on GitHub. I forked it in order to allow everyone to upgrade to a later version and was asked in the forums whether I would write a plugin as well, but declined because I was lacking knowledge and didn't want to spend too much time on it.
In the meantime I have spun up 3 DO droplets running FreeBSD, one for metaspora.org where I put my slides for talks and some demos, and one which is already partially the new home of orangecms.org. I also built a newer kernel and base system for my laptop in order to upgrade from an older version I had in the GhostBSD installation and switched over to pkg-ng and the official FreeBSD repos.
I'm usually on Linux (Gentoo and Arch), so sometimes I'm a bit confused with a few differences (like command-line switches cannot me added later, e.g. ls foo/ -l doesn't work, it has to be ls -l foo/), but besided that, FreeBSD has always been a great experience. I also tried OpenBSD, which was fun until I accidentally dd'ed to the wrong target once (/dev/sda is *not* the USB drive, haha - shit happens 🙃).

Anyway, long story short - now that I have more experience and my company is giving new laptops to the employees, I also want FreeBSD on mine. The question is now which distro to choose. I am considering three flavors, not the basic FreeBSD though - because, you know, that'd be too easy:
- - PacBSD, formerly Arch BSD, so basically a system like Arch Linux (which I'm using the most), just with a different kernel and init system, as far is I understood
- - Gentoo/FreeBSD, which sounds very hard and they are currently lacking developers and stability, judging from the docs and project pages
- - trueOS, formerly PC-BSD, which I know from you guys and Kris' brother Ken of course, and which is basically FreeBSD with pkg-ng and the usual ports tree, just with pre-installed GUI stuff, so that would be the easiest way, right?
I am tending towards trueOS because it looks like the project is doing very well and I occasionally run Lumina DE on Linux for guests on my machine, so I'm familiar with it. I could contribute to the project and maybe make Lumina's panel compatible with other window managers like i3, which I mainly use. Plus, I know the pleasures of building Qt and upgrading it from Gentoo. My requirements would include encrypted partitions either way, since I'll have company data on the machine. Plus I will need to write some ports myself because of some software we're using.

Do you guys have any further recommendations what I should keep in mind? The hardware should be just fine, it will be a TUXEDO Book BU1406, which is the same device as the System76 Lemur, mainly designed for Linux.

Thanks already in advance!
Dan