So, I threw FreeBSD on my IBM Thinkpad T20 the other day for shits and giggles. I've messed with FreeBSD in the past, and have some degree of familiarity with it, so this time I wasn't going in blind.
Installation was fast this time. I did a minimal install and was up and running with a basic system in about 30 minutes.
So far as I could tell, all of my hardware was working as it should out of the box. Network card "just works", and I got connected without having to do a damn thing. I installed X and had Fluxbox, Thunderbird, and Firefox working in short order (all pulled from the FreeBSD package repository).
FreeBSD is the system that Gentoo wants to be. Have I mentioned that before? If you're using Gentoo, you should probably be using Free or OpenBSD instead (unlease, of course, you're a GPL zealot...)
Let me say this - FreeBSD is flipping fast on this machine. I had previously been running Debian Unstable (my favorite Linux distribution), and I now feel a noticable speed boost in X since I switched. I mean, it's ungodly snappy from a system this old - of course, I *am* running Fluxbox, so it's supposed to be snappy, but I was running BlackBox with Debian so I don't think I can blame the window manager. FreeBSD is just faster.
I'm still a little scared of ports. With Debian, when I get a package, I know people have used the exact same package on tons of other systems. It's been tested, and it will work (well, not always in Unstable...). Ports I just have less faith in, but I'm not sure my lack of faith is really justified. Time will tell.
FreeBSD is so... minimal. It has an incredible manual, far better than anything I've seen for any Linux flavor. But when it comes to crazy system config tools... there just aren't many. You have your pkg_ utilities to deal with packages, and your cvsup and portupgrade utilities to deal with ports... but other than that, it's almost entirely standard Unix tools. I rather like that.
FreeBSD feels very "clean" to me, and it's rather growing on me. I may do more with it in the future.