This is going to kill me to say this because I have been using freebsd since 2.x but the lack of commercial support from the likes of Dell really hurts. Recently I couldn't find the cli utility to manage a raid card because the ports system had an out of date location for the source. I was reduced to shutting down a production server just to flip some configuration bits. Freebsd is absolutely rock solid as an OS. The support from certain hardware vendors is a different story.
I wish there was a commercial vendor out there that would have FreeBSD available. It would be very helpful in getting it into more businesses as that is a major show stopper.
I think there could be a major market for this, given that Oracle is no longer giving away Solaris. With ZFS support, FreeBSD is a very attractive alternative.
Does anyone have any insight into how well freebsd runs on laptops? Power management, suspend, wireless and such? As an X desktop is it in the same league as fedora/opensuse when running KDE?
Wireless depends on the chipset that is in use. Atheros still has by far the best support. Power management there are some, it is still hit and miss. My old laptop is fully supported, which is pretty awesome.
As an X desktop you can run gnome, kde, xfce, xfwm, or really anything. Some components are Linux only (Xfce was recently bit by this) and thus may not work as expected or poorly if there is no abstraction layer that allows for us the use of devd(8) for example.
FreeBSD is my favourite OS for servers, it has good hardware support there where it matters most, and best of all is extremely stable. If Linux has met your needs so far, or even Windows, then stick with it. You won't find anything new and exciting and may even find it frustrating that certain things don't work as expected due to differences in API's that are available.
If you want a distribution of FreeBSD that is pretty well geared towards desktops, may I suggest taking a look at PC-BSD. They generally are not too far behind the official release of FreeBSD with their FreeBSD version, and it is an KDE environment that is easy to install.
PC-BSD is good if you want to cut your teeth without having to climb out of common pitfalls to those new to the BSD world. I used it last summer and found it to be pretty good except there was some kind of bug at the time with flash which had a memory leak. Also, it uses a GPT which can cause problems later when you try to install another OS. After searching online I found a solution to dd the entire disk with /dev/null in order to wipe out the backup which sits at the end of the drive.
If you're ready for the real thing - go for straight up FreeBSD. They are extremely organized, you can go to one site for all of your questions, everything is well documented. They have pre-compiled third party binaries available known as packages in addition to all of the source which you can compile yourself. There is also a 'Linux compatibility mode' so that you can run Linux binaries.
The last time I played with PC-BSD there was a lag time of a couple of days. I hadn't checked before making my statement above. I hereby stand corrected.
Thanks for the great roundup. I've been mulling over a switch to freebsd mostly for some security features, mainly the TrustedBSD MAC network ACLs and signed binaries + the uncommon target theory. The mobility features sound pretty hopeful really (more than I was expecting), so I'll get off my ass and give it a try. Thanks for the advice.
I used both Debian and Arch Linux for a while, and was able to get both running from a CLI install (but am by no means a power user.) When I tried freebsd for my Dell laptop, I couldn't get the wireless working. It has some cool features though, and it's fun to see the logic of how things work (different filesystem layout, ports and such.) I recommend playing with it.
I've been using FreeBSD on IBM Thinkpads for years, mostly with the old T4x models. YMMV with the ACPI on newer models and other brands. Power management, suspend / resume, and wireless all work. As mentioned elsewhere ath(4) is your best bet for wireless. Graphics performance is never quite on par with Linux, but fine for browsing and editing text.
If you are running ZFS this release marks a major improvement.
ZFS v15 really helps with the overzealous memory allocation that earlier versions were plagued with on FreeBSD. Upgrading to 8.2 gave me a 20% - 30% R/W performance increase out of the box without any sort of tuning or optimization.
I currently run a free amazon micro instance with FreeBSD and haven't received any surprise charges. As long as you respect the boundaries of the free instance, you should have no problems.
