BSD OS thread

Can anyone share their experiences with any of the BSD Unix variants and what they liked/disliked about BSD. I am a curious potential user. Also, can anyone perhaps offer any advice as to whether my laptop hardware is suitable for BSD? I believe my sound card is a Realtek card. Thanks!

 

Wow. Nobody here has ever used BSD?

 

I used PC-BSD for a while before I went with Kubuntu. I found that PC-BSD installed very easily and very quickly. The graphical installer was quite nice.

My laptop at the time was, and still is, an IBM T20 (PIII 700/384MB/12GB). All the hardware was pretty well recognized, except for the wifi card - with the good/bad old Broadcom chip. Other than that, I had no operational problems.

The only difficulty I had with PC-BSD was the package process. Yes, the FreeBSD ports were available, however the PBI packager was much simpler, but more limited in scope. The PBI repository has had some time to increase since then and I know that PC-BSD itself is still under active development.

If you want to try a BSD, give PC-BSD a look.