I run Debian Testing and FreeBSD 10. I haven't found too much from Debian that I can't get in FreeBSD 10. I could even run a Debian/kFreeBSD jail if I really wanted to.
What really does my head in is that a default Debian install can pull down 2 megabytes a second from a server over SFTP, and a default FreeBSD 10 server can only do ~800 kilobytes per second (FreeBSD 9 was worse).
> What really does my head in is that a default Debian install can pull down 2 megabytes a second from a server over SFTP, and a default FreeBSD 10 server can only do ~800 kilobytes per second
Shouldn't be that much of a difference. You might try OpenSSH from ports, maybe the HPN patches will help if you're on a high latency connection.