[bobobo1618]

I'm curious, how difficult is it to set one up?

Do you encounter many issues performing your day to day work?

I've been eyeing it for a while and I had it running on my home server for a time but I didn't think it was quite ready to be my primary OS. I generally use Arch Linux at the moment, mainly because I like the configurability and frequent package updates.

[cperciva]

There's a few glitches -- I don't have the latest Intel graphics drivers, and as a result the video doesn't work when I resume from S3, for example -- but aside from those, it's really quite straightforward. For a long time there were problems with flash, but with linux emulation enabled it "just works" under Chromium; it's been years since I had OpenOffice fail to open a Microsoft Office document. Java is a bit of a nuisance to build, but for licensing reasons, not technical reasons.

Obviously you need to be comfortable at a command line -- the most common "maintenance" you'll be doing is updating ports, and every couple of months you'll find that /usr/ports/UPDATING says "the foo port has [done something weird] and you need to run the following commands before/after updating" (often it's a matter of deleting a port because its contents got merged into something else) -- but if you've got Arch Linux experience I can't imagine that you'll find much difficulty using FreeBSD.

[dfc]

Colin is the security officer for FreeBSD. I doubt he encountered many problems setting it up;)

[cperciva]

I may know security, but there are a great many developers who know more arcane details about FreeBSD than I do.

[Wilya]

Depends on what you expect, really. Setting up isn't much harder than, say, an Arch.

Hardware support is generally ok, though if you want 3D acceleration, Nvidia is about the only safe option (ATI is absent, Intel can be tricky or non-supported, depending).

Keeping 3rd party programs up to date can be a real pain, though. I haven't found a way to avoid long compilations, occasional breakage, and weird library issues. Compiling Firefox can be annoying.

(I run FreeBSD as my home server where basically all my data and important programs live, and a variety of other "throwaway" OSes in my day to day use)

[pavanky]

I tried out pcbsd, which I think is based off FreeBSD. The only issue I had was everything being built from source. Considering that userspace is pretty much the same for BSD and Linux, I am guessing there wont be many issues. Coming from an Arch Linux back certainly helps I think.

The drawbacks have to be the lack of certain binary driver blobs available in Linux. Some may call it a feature though.

[Lammy]

I've a little how-to written up for putting together a nice FreeBSD desktop system. You may want to check it out: http://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to...

FreeBSD has been my go-to desktop OS since 2005 or so, since giving up on OS X post-Tiger.