BSD on the desktop is possible, especially if you use something like FreeBSD where the hardware support is generally ahead of NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and OpenBSD, and support for newer technologies is more available (binary drives from NVIDIA are pretty important as well if you want 3D acceleration), sadly though support is lacking for a lot of drivers. FreeBSD for example is just getting around to implementing the parts required for Intel graphics [1].
However compared to Linux I wouldn't use BSD as a desktop/laptop system. Linux is simply further along in supporting what is required for power saving, for clocking the cpu up and down, newer technologies and even older technologies if you are using older devices (in [1] for example, only gen4-6 graphics are supported, so if you have older Intel it won't work, or not correctly).
The other major issue is that many of the projects such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE and others have started using so many different Linux only interfaces for which no good documentation exists to replicate the functionality in the BSD's that you will find that certain features just don't work. See for example [2] which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to drop support for the BSD's... on that same post you see a comment from Warner Losh the creator of devd(8) on FreeBSD asking where he can find good documentation on udev in Linux so that he can implement the compatibility stream on top of devd(8) [3].
No, I would not use BSD on the desktop unless it is by purchasing Mac OS X. Personally I am a HUGE FreeBSD fan, I absolutely love it. I run FreeBSD almost exclusively on my servers unless a specific piece of software very specifically requires Linux. I build software for FreeBSD, I deliver to clients FreeBSD installs and do consulting based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD on the server is absolutely fantastic, it is rock solid, I've had machines running for years on end without issues (no, not internet facing ones, yes they were all patched for remote exploits, local exploits I cared less about in this particular setting). Unfortunately I no longer run FreeBSD as my desktop, I used to for the longest time but unfortunately that time has come and gone.
Personally I am currently using a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8 for my desktop/laptop needs, which provides me the same interfaces as FreeBSD does so it makes programming fairly simple. If it compiles/builds on Mac OS X it is almost guaranteed to compile/build on FreeBSD and run without issues.
See for example [2] which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to drop support for the BSD's.
It seems like you can run XFCE on BSD, but some features are not supported.. That said, their about page isn't entirely honest, it should mention what features are Linux-only.
Thanks a lot for your comments. I love seeing anything FreeBSD related on HN these days as it's something I am newly interested in. I too run OS X locally (for years) but have been a Linux guy for as long as I can remember.
Do you have a suggestion on a solid FreeBSD VPS host? I really love Linode for my linux boxes and have been using them for years. That being said, I am very interested in moving towards FreeBSD for my personal servers. I'm so amped to learn more about it.
I have looked in the past for a FreeBSD VPS host but I could never find anything satisfactory or as large as Linode so that I had some semblance of knowledge that my instance wouldn't disappear tomorrow.
One of the big issues I see is that virtualising FreeBSD doesn't always work correctly, last I heard there were issues with FreeBSD and multi-processing on top of Xen for example [2], and there is still no native hypervisor for FreeBSD [1] (I honestly wish they would steal the KVM stuff from OpenIndiana, KVM on Linux absolutely rocks!) and that means you will always be running on top of some other OS or HyperVisor such as KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, and others, so the full stack support for running FreeBSD on top of FreeBSD is still unfortunately out of reach.
[1]: That isn't entirely true, there is a project named BHyVe that is working on this, but I haven't heard/seen any updates since early 2011. Also, it requires that you mask off the memory to be used for virtual machines, unlike KVM and others... See: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe
[2]: http://www.hungryhacker.com/os/freebsd-on-linode/ (See comment about requesting vcpu's to be set to 1: "Linodes default to vcpus=4, which will choke FreeBSD at the moment. They won’t increase this setting of course, but they will happily lower it for you. Simply give them your Linode # and ask them to reduce vcpus to 1 and they’ll make the change.") Do note that the author used FreeBSD 8.1 so it is entirely possible that the limitation is now removed with FreeBSD 9.0
I am facing the exact same problem with Intel GPUs you mentioned. So, currently I am running my video driver in Vesa mode (just 800 x 600 resolution). But, I would still prefer to use an open-source Unix-based system than a proprietory one.
However compared to Linux I wouldn't use BSD as a desktop/laptop system. Linux is simply further along in supporting what is required for power saving, for clocking the cpu up and down, newer technologies and even older technologies if you are using older devices (in [1] for example, only gen4-6 graphics are supported, so if you have older Intel it won't work, or not correctly).
The other major issue is that many of the projects such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE and others have started using so many different Linux only interfaces for which no good documentation exists to replicate the functionality in the BSD's that you will find that certain features just don't work. See for example [2] which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to drop support for the BSD's... on that same post you see a comment from Warner Losh the creator of devd(8) on FreeBSD asking where he can find good documentation on udev in Linux so that he can implement the compatibility stream on top of devd(8) [3].
No, I would not use BSD on the desktop unless it is by purchasing Mac OS X. Personally I am a HUGE FreeBSD fan, I absolutely love it. I run FreeBSD almost exclusively on my servers unless a specific piece of software very specifically requires Linux. I build software for FreeBSD, I deliver to clients FreeBSD installs and do consulting based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD on the server is absolutely fantastic, it is rock solid, I've had machines running for years on end without issues (no, not internet facing ones, yes they were all patched for remote exploits, local exploits I cared less about in this particular setting). Unfortunately I no longer run FreeBSD as my desktop, I used to for the longest time but unfortunately that time has come and gone.
Personally I am currently using a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8 for my desktop/laptop needs, which provides me the same interfaces as FreeBSD does so it makes programming fairly simple. If it compiles/builds on Mac OS X it is almost guaranteed to compile/build on FreeBSD and run without issues.
[1]: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Intel_GPU [2]: http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-flavors [3]: http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-flavors#c14...