You can do that in Linux...
> Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else.
Not really? I think the BSDs are simpler, change less and are better documented.
Source: I ran OpenBSD on desktops in early 2000s.
I think I _may_ have done that before. What I thought was interesting is FreeBSD just did that without any extra steps. When I "apt-get install" a desktop environment in Ubuntu or Debian and reboot, the desktop environment loads by default. In FreeBSD, I guess there's some startup scripts I would need to edit to start X and the desktop manager...
Well, it depends on what you install. If you install just xorg and a window manager, it usually won't boot into it.
If you install GNOME or KDE that ship with a display manager, it will be configured to boot into it. That is what you would usually want though.
> Source: I ran OpenBSD on desktops in early 2000s.
From my experience witb BSDs on a SUN pizza box (also around 2000) : FreeBSD had the docs on the internet, not very helpful when you want to configure the network. OpenBSD was ok. Linux (my first choice) was slow as hell.
RTFM will go a very, very long way on this OS.