its the installer stupid (Score 2)

I run FreeBSD, Mandrake and Windows 2000 all courtesy of GRUB. Windows was pre-installed, it is my brother's machine, Mandrake came second and eventually FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is both the easiest and the hardest to install depending on whether you've done it before. RedHat and Mandrake have wonderful graphical installers and FreeBSD has a graphical installer. Well, an installer. Well, something that if you know what you're doing will result in a working system. But certainly nothing you'd give your mom.

Once FreeBSD was installed configuring it was no more difficult than Linux. My only real complaint is that turning soft updates on for the root file system, and /tmp in my case, can't be done easily. Mounting Mandrake partitions is easy.

KDE, Netscape, RealPlayer etc. looks pretty much like Mandrake but I don't have a graphical session manager. Linux applications, for example Netscape, run perfectly. FreeBSD ports are easier to deal with than RPMs.

I think FreeBSD is a fine desktop system. But the installer could use some work.