You're still boned as soon as someone attempts to enter their name if it uses characters that are not available in ASCII, and say, link that to data from a Unicode application somehow. Amongst a heap of other seemingly trivial use cases that will render your application pretty useless.

PC-BSD would be my suggestion. If not as a destination (though it could be), as a friendly start point to start getting your head around BSD (vs. Linux).

So, noobs then....

Lennart has done some good things in the past

Citation needed.

+1 for PC-BSD. It's basically FreeBSD with a nice package system and more comprehensive installer. If you want FreeBSD on a desktop I highly recommend.

Horses for courses. How's your GPU support?

FreeBSD does have Wifi support, but last I used it ('11) it wasn't exactly intuitive.

In my experience I have had less crashes in the past 15 years with FreeBSD than I have with Linux. I have had crashes with both. I haven't had significantly more blue screens with Windows either, and the ones I have had with windows have been caused by broken hardware or drivers.

Buy decent hardware with proper driver support and most current operating systems are stable. Problem is most people buy bottom dollar hardware.

Welcome to the fold. I did this about 10 years ago for everything I could and haven't looked back.

You're saying that non-Unicode supporting applications are "perfectly working"? The vast majority of the population do not speak English.

If by "web browser" you mean something that had trouble rendering basic pages and was generally painful to use, sure.

SD card slot? Oh noes. How's that fingerprint reader on your Android phone working? How's your software support? Technical spec does not define a product's value, it's what you can do with it and how much of a head fuck it is to live with.

I'd say it was actually Nokia that killed Nokia. There was nothing that stopped Nokia from putting out an Android phone. And Nokia's software was horrible.

And power users complained that Apple stuff doesn't meet their needs - yes, that's true. But Apple doesn't cater to the power user niche - they cater to the common user whose needs are fairly simple.

This often comes up, but many of the power users I know (engineers, including network engineers, etc.) use Macs.

This statement is a fallacy propagated by those who haven't spent any significant time with OS X I suspect. OS X looks shiny on the surface, but is extremely powerful underneath if you care to spend a few days exploring it. It marries unix with a friendly UI and some pretty awesome, easy to use automation capabilities (Automator, Applescript). Yes, other platforms have automation tools as well, but they're nowhere near as quick and easy to make use of.