We decided to put FreeBSD 5.1 on Lauren’s computer, a VPR Matrix 185A5. Previously, she was running Red Hat 9. We switched because the firewire driver would crash a lot, ACPI isn’t turned on in Red Hat 9, and the wireless support was flaky. Also, it would take me FOREVER to install any new functionality because of the authoritarian nature of the Red Hat Network’s list of packages and the sketchiness of “found” RPMs.
FreeBSD 5.1 comes with good ACPI, sound, wireless, and firewire support. The minor challenges were/are XFree86, gdm flakiness (perhaps due to installing gnome 2.2 and then upgrading to 2.4), and re-mounting firewire devices.
The perks: I had no problems installing straw (RSS newsreader), Linux’s Mozilla with flash support, evolution, xmms, or Frozen Bubble (a Snood-like game). Most everything’s been easy to install because of the ports collection.
There have been difficulties with each installation, but FreeBSD’s easy-to-update ports collection will make it easy (for me, at least) to maintain her computer.