Are you using FreeBSD on a laptop?
You can see many non-working things here: http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/ from no sound to can't boot. Power management is also notoriously bad so you need your laptop to be plugged in.
It is reminiscent of Linux a few years ago when everyone with brand new laptops tried to install it.
FreeBSD is still fine on desktop systems and even works quite well for a desktop in some cases, but Linux is just so big at this point that it supports more things, while FreeBSD has always seemed more server oriented.
Apparently you have not tried FreeBSD on an Acer Aspire One netbook, because if you did you would realize that your last paragraph is outdated by at least 3 minor version iterations. I first tried PC-BSD 8.x in 2009, and with KDE as the default DE it unusably slow, but when I tried FreeBSD 8.x last year I was pleasantly suprised with how well the system ran on my little netbook. Then, when I upgraded to 9.0 I realized that I had finally found what I had been searching for all these years. Now, with 9.1 the system is even better.
Yes, FreeBSD lacks some features that Linux has, but it's still being developed and it has its uses outside of the server market too. For example, Sony is reportedly using it as the core OS for the new PS4 and there's a project that is aiming to create a HUD device which is also based on FreeBSD, http://hmdviking.blogspot.jp/
It was a lot like Linux used to be in the late 90s though... I tried to put it on a few other machines with less success.
Crunchbang just doesn't compare as far as speed goes. I tested both OS' with Xfce4.1, as well as no DE with dwm & dmenu. In each case FreeBSD blows crunchbang away, and this is on an Intel Atom N270 with 1 GB RAM.
The only thing #! has going for it is ease of setup, but FreeBSD isn't that hard to setup and use, and all questions I've had are easily answered by reading the FreeBSD Handbook.
Some will decry FBSD's support for suspend/hibernate, but since I never use those features it's a non issue for me. That said, I do believe that suspend, etc, is working for some laptops, although YMMV.
| Some will decry FBSD's support for
| suspend/hibernate, but since I never
| use those features it's a non issue for me.
Sometimes the simplest things are so abstruse to some of us.
Are you able to at least suspend to disk?
On the flip side:
- Using suspend-to-RAM is less secure.
- Enabling secure swap (at least on Linux with in a password-less setup[1]) doesn't work with suspend-to-disk.
[1] In a password-less setup, there is no way to recover the swap after a fresh boot since the key is regenerated on every boot (at least it was the case the last time that I manually setup encrypted swap).