FreeBSD is a great operating system. It's fast, reliable, and you have superb control over all its features. Here are some resources that may help you as a fellow user.
HOWTOs
I have written some HOWTOs:
- Using the BPF device
- Installing FreeBSD on a Thinkpad R50e, which happens to be my personal notebook
- Using the Microsoft Windows 7 (or Vista) Boot Manager to boot FreeBSD
- Using K3b with FreeBSD
Send me any feedback you've got.
Projects
Some projects that involved FreeBSD:
- Some notes and pointers for using a Soekris 4801-50 as an über-router
My personal setup
Apart from my home workstation, I also run FreeBSD on my laptop, an IBM ThinkPad R50e. There are no significant problems with FreeBSD 7.2.
Of DEs and WMs
Despite my best efforts, I still won't consider using a fully-fledged desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME because they are too complex for me. Not complex in terms of bloat (quite the contrary: It is called a desktop environment after all, so what do people expect?), but complex in terms of "I don't need this feature and this program" or "I don't know where the configuration files for this thingy are located".
In short:
- I want to know where the configuration files are.
- I want full control over my desktop environment. It is called personal computer for a reason.
So, as long as there is no great alternative, I am going with the Fluxbox window manager.
Software
You should try some of the following applications:
- Conky
- dmenu
- exfalso & quodlibet
- Fluxbox
- mc