[VLM]

No (serious) problems here.

I want to run the same OS on my desktops as my servers to minimize expensive brain context switching, so I'm not into the pc-bsd concept, however, numerous people recommended it as a desktop flavor of freebsd. You MIGHT have better luck with hardware drivers or software integration on pc-bsd, if you have problems with freebsd. Maybe. Think of it like freebsd is to pc-bsd as debian is to ubuntu, sorta.

http://www.pcbsd.org/

As for my non-significant problems, there was some weirdness with haskell and long term (days, weeks) stability of xmonad, so I switched over to awesome as my window manager with an identical keyboard layout.

I have no experience with desktop environments on freebsd on my desktops... no interest. I need something that switches between emacs, terminal, and browser, that's the total extent of my environment. I'm told freebsd can run KDE and Gnome, although I don't want them. I point this out because some people define desktop by hardware, or by end user use, or others define that word as "runs gnome", and I can only verify the first two definitions.