Yes, I'm using FreeBSD on my netbook. I tried some Linux distros there, but they were too slow. My netbook came with Fedora, where yum was terribly lagging, it was taking even 40minutes to upgrade 20pacakges (what happened weekly), I tried Debian with LXDE, it was faster, but I wasn't able to watch youtube, video was lagging on 460p. GF was using it as portable PC to listen to podcasts etc, but starting any application like firefox, thunderbird or clementine was taking way too long. When Debian switched to systemD, I decided to give FreeBSD a try after 10 years with Debian/Arch and CentOS on server. I was impressed that command line installation of FreeBSD was simpler than Manjaro with GUI. Honestly, application startup of Firefox, Thunderbid was much quicker, youtube videos work with 720p (nearly full screen of the netbook :D). I had some problems setting up my dev environment there, like Qt5 is said to work out of box, but I had to make some manual fixes to get it working system-wide. Setup of Xorg and SLIM was something different than SDDM on ArchLinux.

I don't know about Intel KMS, I use FreeBSD on portable netbook and my work-station (Dell laptop - came with Ubuntu) and everything is superb. You will need to dig some stuff like rc.conf, but documentation is very clear and once you modified it, you're 100% that it will work after reboot. I still don't remember and know from memory how to enable acpi support on Linux (backlight control on laptops, it worked out of box on both laptops on BSD). if you don't have much time to read about it, install bsdconfig from ports it's a nice command line application that helps you select necessary features of the system.

If anything, it's definitely worth giving BSD a try just to get some new experience! I'm also highly impressed with DragonFlyBSD, worth reading their documentation to learn that BSD systems are ahead of Linux when it comes to security and system design.

Here, have some resources (includes my blog): https://www.b.agilob.net/freebsd-on-netbook-acer-aspire/ https://www.b.agilob.net/qt5-on-freebsd/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://networkfilter.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/security-openbsd... https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01