I remember installing it in 92 or 93 when I was in grad school via a big pile of floppies. It was liberating to turn an otherwise useless PC into something more or less equivalent to a sparcstation. I was a huge linux fan and evangelized for it everywhere. A few years later, I was acting as a sysadmin, and wanted to replace some aging DECstations with PCs running Linux. The prototype machine was great, except for how…
Oh, FreeBSD. I remember using the 5.x branch as my sole OS. It was a bit rough, but in the end not that much different from linux these days. Maybe a bit slower, but I did not cared. It survived everything I've done to it for several years, including me nuking the whole ports tree in /var on accident. :) So, how is it these days compared to Linux as a Desktop? With the current privacy-violating course of action at Ap…
The good parts are ZFS and ZFS boot environments, and general stability.
The bad parts are updating ports/packages because in terms of ports/packages, FreeBSD is a "rolling release" distro, meaning that upgrades are often "interesting". I'd vastly prefer if it were more like Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL and had a fixed base set of 3rd party software, with a "ppa" like mechanism to get the latest version of only what you need. However, there is just not enough manpower to support that.
I cope with it by running the -stable quarterly packages on my -current desktop, and so I deal with upgrade pain only a few times a year, not every time I update my system. I've also switched to running Linux firefox via the linux jails project. This is nice, because I can apt-get update && apt-get upgrade the linux stuff, and have most of what I want upgraded (web facing stuff like firefox) without touching the native ports/packages.