Best way to switch from Linux to BSD

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Jason Hsu wrote:
> I've been trying to switch from Linux to BSD for my everyday computing (email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc.), but I couldn't get things to work properly.  I've been so spoiled by the quickness and user-friendliness of antiX/Swift Linux and Puppy Linux for so long.  I have a backlog of stuff to do, so I'm sticking to Linux for now as my main OS.  However, I might try BSD in VirtualBox and on my laptop.
>    
I have to say that I am taking a bit of the opposite route.  I learned 
Unix on SunOS, and so when I tried i386 Unix's, FreeBSD wasn't that hard 
for me.  I have slowly learned quite a lot about its inner workings.  
 From a system administrator's perspective, FreeBSD is pure delight.

But the desktop experience of Ubuntu is so easy, and it works so much 
"out of the box" that I am switching to Ubuntu for a lot of my everyday 
desktop needs.  So, for example, getting flash to work properly with 
firefox on amd64 is too much of a pain under FreeBSD.  And my new ASUS 
laptop has an elan touchpad, which Ubuntu could handle out of the box, 
but FreeBSD couldn't recognize its special features.

One place I do use my computer a lot is with floating point numerically 
intensive programming.  I find that FreeBSD and Unix take turns as to 
who does this the best.  As of today, FreeBSD is definitely winning.  So 
I will always keep both OS's on my computers.

Another thing I love about the ports system in FreeBSD is that you can 
compile the code yourself, switch on or off many of the features of that 
particular piece of software, but still have it play nice with the 
FreeBSD packaging system.  Maybe there is a similar thing I can do with 
Ubuntu, but I haven't figured it out yet.  And I'm not prepared to go 
another route like gentoo - what's the point when I already have FreeBSD.