My Mom made me learn FreeBSD the day I turned like 13 and she still makes me drive her daily.You guys who use FreeBSD as a daily driver on desktops.
Just curious, why you've picked FreeBSD instead of Linux, Mac...? IMHO, it would be great to have this kind of information up to date in 2023.
And everything else, as I quickly discovered, is just plain stupid.
It's about the business, the enthusiasm of the community, the birds singing...Windows' "golden days" were in late 90s, early 2000s. Linux's golden days were circa 2005-2008. FreeBSD appears to be having its golden days now, which is helpful.
I use both windowmaker and kde 5 plasma as desktops on freebsd and linux. I don't use windows or mac. I'm a programmer so its good to have all the tools available. Fbsd is a bit behind linux in a few areas, bluetooth being the one I've hit recently (I wanted to drive some bt speakers, gave up after trying), another is more restricted software availability than linux. The software I use a lot, like wmaker, vim, cmus, cscope, ctags, vifm, slrn, irssi, links (browser), X11 (networked window system is a must), Perl, C compiler and toolchain, git, firefox, too many others to mention but you get the picture, is all available.
Fbsd wins in some areas, the ports system is nice, although code I download tends to compile easier on linux without patching whereas some hacks are often needed on bsd, probably because it was developed on linux in the first place. System updates tend to go pretty well on both o/s's nowadays, and stability of both is good.
As a desktop fbsd has all the tools I need, openoffice, the kde office suite, pdf readers (nice to see mupdf in ports), etc etc. I like the link aggregation that gives me painless failover between wifi and ethernet network connections without the need for something like network manager. I haven't tried getting my 3-in-1 HP laser printer/scanner working on freebsd yet, I still drive that from linux at the moment.
And one other thing that's good about Fbsd. There isn't the constant worry about viruses, malware and security fixes that I get on windows.There is one other thing, which is kind of philosophical. I want it to be MY computer (as much as any cpu with an intel ME in it can be mine). If I use a mac or windows, it's not my computer. It's a leaf node in their system, that I have a somewhat restrictive license to use. It's sending telemetry back to them about what I do with the machine, it's sticking ads in front of my eyes, it's installing all kinds of crap and on the machine in the background. In the case of apple it's telling me that my perfectly good hardware is "no longer supported" and they want me to buy it from them again.
In the old days a home micro or a DOS PC was yours. No telemetry, no ads, no unattended updates, no monitoring. The bsd's and linux (at least, things like slackware) are about as close to that as its possible to get in modern systems.