[loudmax]

My experience of learning Unix from the installation process back in 2001 or was kind of the reverse. I installed Red Hat on an old machine and it the desktop GUI worked out of the box. That wasn't really what I was going for, so I installed FreeBSD instead and I had to configure X11 and everything else manually, and I learned a lot.

Totally agree that once up and running, FreeBSD is extremely reliable. Linux can be reliable, but it depends a lot of the distribution, and what you're doing with it.

[cempaka]

Yeah I would say FreeBSD is about on the level of Arch as far as where it starts you off after the installation. But it makes configuring either one a great learning exercise.