The two I looked at were PC-BSD and Desktop BSD , which are built for the non-technical user with an easy installer. Both run KDE as their window managers so once installed it should make any Linux user feel right at home. For the Windows user you will find a tight environment that is similar to that of Windows and it shouldn't be much of a learning curve.

The installers in both really are nice and I breezed through them both without much thought; although, Desktop BSD wins in the hard drive setup area. PC-BSD leaves you with not many options when you go to partition your disk. I found also some things seemed to do nothing when clicked. If you are planning on using the whole drive both will automatically partition and format the drive for you.

Once installed I found most of my hardware to be working in both flavors! I was pretty amazed considering I am on a laptop and use a Wacom tablet. I installed on a Gateway M675 laptop and found both PC-BSD and Desktop BSD failed to get the sound drivers or external buttons working, which most Linux distributions find trivial to get working these days. All and all, pretty good for BSD on a laptop either way. I would say most desktop machines with a typical sound card (not on board) should not have this sound problem.

Both have software updating, which did require a little minor setup, but they do have updating. This is important to me as I do not want to manually keep track of security updates and kernel patches, etc.

PC-BSD has an interesting way of handling software management, which I really kind of like. It has it's own package system and the software can be searched and downloaded from their software page . The packages are called PBIs. Once you have downloaded the software you simply double click the PBI and it will install. The package manager keeps track of all installed software and allows for easy uninstall later. Very nice and I don't have to keep track of sources lists and repository links.

Desktop BSD uses the FreeBSD package manager, which is similar to the repositories found in Debian . I found it to be very slow and unreliable. I was not impressed at all.

After a couple of days of using these systems I really just feel the love of these Free BSD based user friendly operating systems! They are solid as a rock and stable as hell. I ran into no issues aside from the above mentioned. I was going to pick one as the winner, but honestly, they both failed to load my sound/front panel controls so I can't fault just one there. Desktop BSD has a little better installer and PC-BSD has a little better software management system so all I can really say is they both win.