This weekend I installed FreeBSD 10.1 on a disk of my desktop. Beyond the fact that we are using that system at work, more and more, I was just curious about the setup for a desktop. I was pleasantly surprised and everything went very smoothly.
I’m quite familiar with Linux and that was enough for making the ride very easy. The general impression is that actually the system is simpler than on Linux, maybe more consistent. The pkg system, alternative to the traditional ports system, makes thing much more ‘out of the box’.
And for the rest, well, in one afternoon, and just by following the doc, I had my window manager up and running, and ready to begin playing with bhyve. I was surprised to see that bhyve kernel modules were included by default in recent releases. I heard there are still some bumps on the road for laptop about the sleep to disk mode, but I’m not concerned by that.
It feels like BSD is a shy actor that actually powers much more stuff that we can suspect. But it has a pretty active community and a very decent documentation. Well, give it a try if you like playing with various distributions of free and open operating systems. It’s much less scary that its reputation seems to convey.