We have now regressed to telling anecdotes from our ... well not youth, more mid-life ...
That's because the topics of "FreeBSD is not like ...", "FreeBSD is not what I need" and "FreeBSD is not suitable for the desktop" really don't have any interesting new thing to add.
I'm going to be that guy and point out that the 386-40 was an AMD product and did have a math co.
No, the 386-40 that I used was the 32-bit data bus version, and did not have an FPU. And that was part of the problem: I had used it under DOS from about 1991 onwards (where lack of floating point didn't bother me), and by the time I needed floating point, the 386 market was getting thin. And finding a compatible 387 FPU was hard, because neither Intel nor AMD made the 387 in 40 MHz. I had to hunt for the Cyrix part, which was very rare. And as I mentioned, there was no internet. So I spend an afternoon driving around all of San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Palo Alto (along El Camino), stopping at every computer store. Eventually, there was a person who barely spoke English in a corner store in southern Palo Alto, and when I asked for a Cyrix 387-40, he opened his desk drawer, and among the pencils there was a clearly used chip, no anti-static protection. He only wanted $20 or $40 for it (no tax, no receipt), so I took it, and it worked fine.
Gopher FTW! Over a 2600 modem, natch. Do you remember the phone number for that BBS that had all the good drivers for NICs? It was a life saver when a driver floppy in your carefully curated collection went bad.
I had a 9600 baud modem at home (courtesy of my employer, who also supplied a bank of dial-in numbers). I didn't actually use IP over it (at that point, that was still SLIP, PPP was not really available, but configuring SLIP required root access on both sides, and at my employer that was impossible). Instead I used a userspace program that allowed remote login, copying files, and tunneling X sessions (at 9600 baud!). It might have been called "term" or something like that. The performance was awful. On the other hand, I had used IBM mainframes via 300 baud acoustic couplers, and VAXes and Unix machines via 1200 and 2400 baud modems (with VT100s at home), so 9600 baud was quite pleasant.
Don't forget Google, with Android and Chromebook as exhibits A and B. It is possible to build a user friendly Linux device.
Yes, but you can't start with X windows and the standard DEs, which were written by hackers for hackers. Instead, you put a team of designers and market researchers on figuring out what users need and want. And then you have professional software engineers (instead of hackers) implement it. Same with the Mac: You can put a really good GUI on top of a FreeBSD-derived OS.
