I'm almost convinced. I've been toying with FreeBSD 7 on a vm a while ago, and I liked it. There's a certain "feel" about the whole system, and I really like that feel. Now I'm considering putting it on my laptop. I'm just wondering about a few possible showstoppers. Tell me about...
- Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt? I like installing&testing new stuff, trying out various funny Python libraries, etc. I need the process of finding, installing, upgrading, removing packages to be quick and efficient.
- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.
- Full disk encryption. This is a must and I'm not going anywhere without it. I suppose it's there; but can I have swap on encrypted logical volume and still be able to do suspend to disk? (suspend to ram is also really handy)
- NetworkManager? Or something equivalent. I don't want to go to commandline unless a task that I'm performing demands by its very nature a command-oriented user interface.
- 3D support on Intel graphics?
- read&write support for ext3, ntfs, etc for Linux and Windows inter-op?
That'd be all for now...