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Comment by hillbillyjack | Hacker News Reader

I doubt he is, it has been hard to get FreeBSD working on any laptop that isn't specifically supported by someone.

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.

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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have not tried FreeBSD on an Acer Aspire One netbook, because if you did you would realize that your last paragraph is outdated by at least 3 minor version iterations.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.

I used to run a PC-BSD system and it pretty much worked out of the box, that is until I got an AMD 6* series video card but I hear the radeon driver is being developed and very close to being integrated into FreeBSD 10 and backported to 9.

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/

A few years ago I ran OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. Worked well.

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.

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