If you're new to unix, FreeBSD 10 alpha is definitely not what you want. By default, FreeBSD installs no GUI, and v10 is not production ready yet - it is a development snapshot. If you want something equivalent to Ubuntu, check out PC-BSD, which is the user-friendly desktop oriented variant of FreeBSD.

There's no single killer advantage, but the general trend i've seen with FreeBSD after having used it since 2001 (Linux since 1996) is that in general, whilst some things seem to take longer to be supported in FreeBSD, generally once implemented, the implementation is stable. As in, it isn't junked and replaced with something completely different 18 months later. Linux tends to be in much more of a state of flux - this can be good if you want to run the very latest, however if you want something a bit more battle tested, it is not.

FreeBSD has different trees which are "supported" for a much longer period of time than most Linux distributions. Due to the seperation of the base OS and ports, you can run a battle-tested, stable core OS and updated ports. This is a lot trickier to do and far less common in the Linux world.

In short: yes. The handbook is front and center on the main website menu under documentation. If someone is unable to find that even before they find the link to the ISO, there's no helping them.

I'm not quite sure how one can point out the exceedingly obvious documentation without sounding condescending?

Just because you are doing it wrong, it doesn't mean rm is poo. Try: "rm -Rf foo" instead.

Uh... iOS has supported ipv6 for some time now. I have native IPv6 at home and my iPhone/iPad pick up an ipv6 address and work dual-stack just fine?

Self-contained applications is a nice idea, but it makes sense primarily with non-free binary only applications which the user or the OS distribution can't build from source code

Uh... no. It makes sense for any OS if you want to get away from dependency hell.

I can take an OS X application and simply drag/drop to any other OS X install (so long as it is of a supported version of the OS). There is one dependency - the OS version.

I can also run apps from anywhere (hell, even the disk image I downloaded them from), no need to worry about where they are installed.

Apple is sandboxing applications because writing software that is secure is hard, whether it is open source or closed source. Sandboxing and least privilege access is a way of attempting to deal with this problem: simply attempting to write secure applications has been proven over the last 30 years or so to be a problem we're not going to solve any time soon. Containing the problem as best we can via sandboxing perhaps reduces the amount of code that is security critical (the sandbox enforcement).

So long as it is redundant and battery backed up, that's a bit different.

"Mommy, where are you?" :(

No, I couldn't be bothered to pay attention until they were in places I saw them, like the stores I shop at or the pockets of people I know.

The iPhone high density display isn't just high density, it's also high quality, which not all high density displays are (the ones that do the pentile pixels are far inferior for anything except for picture viewing).

Apple brought high density screens from something I read about, to everywhere, and it was the killer feature they had locked down for a while.

Too bad this company stopped doing consumer products like BeyondTV. I wonder what are good ones these days.

That is what older generations always say about the younger generations. :/

I assumed more battery life without checking because chromebook, I guess the macbook air or high end ultra book are close, but 13 inch breaks downsize barrier?

You should treat EVERY drive as suspect and about to fail. Whether it spins or is solid state.

If your windows 7 install is taking almost 5 minutes to boot, there's a problem, and it isn't because it is on a spinning disk.