New to FreeBSD

[David Gurvich]

Hello,
I have installed FreeBSD on a server and on a laptop.  The laptop is
more important in indicating some of the changes in FreeBSD.
After all, you need graphics, wireless, sound, etc. for a good
experience.  All of these currently are and have been issues for both
Linux and FreeBSD.

I actually am using FreeBSD on a laptop that had Debian installed.
There were too many issues with hardware on an older laptop that, from
everything I found, should have worked well.  Problems with
suspend/resume, graphics card, wireless, and sound.  I had been reading
about improvements in FreeBSD and decided to try it.

There were no issues with sound, graphics, and minor suspend/resume.
Wireless did not work in 6.3, but was simple in 7.0. I had to add 5
lines to loader.conf, 3 to rc.conf, and create a wpa_supplicant.conf
file. All done.  

My only remaining issue was initial desktop configuration of kde/kdm.
That brought me to DesktopBSD and PC-BSD.  Both worked well enough,
though PC-BSD is better.  I've had to update the kernel to 7.0 to
get wireless working, non-trivial but simple.