Rubenerd

I always add conditions to my Ansible playbooks to check the target OS and distribution. Until recently I did this:

- name: Install FreeBSD package (legacy)
  community.general.pkgng:
      name: "cowsay"
      state: present
  when: ansible_distribution == "FreeBSD"

This is also useful for differentiating between different distributions of the same OS, such as Debian or Fedora.

Reddit: Preferable to use ansible_facts or ansible_distribution?

According to akasivel on this Ansible thread, this will soon be formally deprecated in favour of ansible_facts:

- name: Install FreeBSD package
  community.general.pkgng:
      name: "cowsay"
      state: present
  when: ansible_facts['distribution'] == "FreeBSD"