[tristor]

I use FreeBSD on my personal laptop. I picked up an X230 used on eBay and upgraded it so that it has 2x256GB SSDs in a ZFS mirror and 16GB of RAM. More than enough horsepower to do anything I need, and FreeBSD ensures that it's used most efficiently.

Much like many people on HN, I suspect, I do most of my work /and/ my play at the command line. Once you're there for a significant amount of your time you begin to get a respect for tight integration in the BSD base system and the superb documentation which is included. Because of the docs, I can reasonably work in an environment where I have no Internet access for an extended period of time without feeling like I'm suffering. In the Linux world, I find myself spending more time looking things up on search engines and less times looking things up in the manual. This simply isn't the case with FreeBSD, which means I'm less tied to being online and more tied to getting stuff done.

YMMV but I love FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop OS. I know many people also use OpenBSD on laptops because of superior driver support for some hardware, but the Linux emulation in FreeBSD allows me to guarantee no matter what I'm trying to do it will work, so I stick to FreeBSD vs OpenBSD for my uses.