Okay so I just finished installing FreeBSD 7.0 on this machine:
AMD Athlon X2 6000+ overclocked to 3.2GHz, 2GB DDR2800, 250gb Seagate Barracuda SATAII, nvidia 8500GT (using nvidia-driver)
This machine has had Ubuntu 32bit, Ubuntu 64bit, Slackware 12.1, Slamd64, Debian 4.0r4 i386, PC-BSD 7.0 Fibonacci. Now I knew that natively-compiled binaries are faster and usually more reliable – but when I decided to “build the world” with FreeBSD 7.0 I was in for a shock from the difference in speed using this system as a desktop environment. KDE and especially gnome are surprisingly faster. Browsing with Firefox 3.0.3 is very snappy and everything just immediately responds.
I think I’m going to stick with this OS for a while. It took about 3 days for the entire project – but most of it was compile time. I probably spent 3 hours at the console doing the installation.
Forgot to include link for instructions:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/fbsd-from-scratch/article.html