Hey there folks. I know I havn't been around these parts much over the last couple months but that's what college will do to you :). I know this question has been asked many times around the interwebs but I thought I would ask it here. Has anyone made any switches for desktop OS from Linux to BSD and have any advice? I feel like there wouldn't be too much because I try to be as POSIX compliant as possible as it is. I just wanted to here your opinions and the like!

If you copy over your ~/* directory with all the config files, and install all the same packages, you'll never know the difference. Firefox, window manager, what have you. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was surprisingly seamless when I first tried.

I have been using Linux since 1999, but I am running OpenBSD 5.6 on a couple of machines for a few weeks.
I downloaded & tested 5.7 yesterday by installing to pendrives, all seems to be going well.
(Next I will have to have a go at upgrading my 5.6 installations to 5.7)
Apart from some programs not being available, not much difference between Linux & BSD, so give it a go.

Edit: Just upgraded one machine from 5.6 to 5.7 - went OK as far as I can tell. :)
Edit2: Second box now upgraded as well.

cjm I wrote a blog post about it on my blog if you're interested, I switched a couple weeks ago: http://blog.greduan.com/2015-04-19-mstobfi.html

It was a super painless experience. And yeah the upgrade was also painless.

Thats an awesome blog post, thanks for posting.

I thought I would have no idea what I was doing when I was using DragonflyBSD, but it was easy to use. If you do not get deep with the internals, it will feel just like Linux.

I love ports tho, it downloads programs faster then any Linux system that I used. And jails is also great if you want to be secure, I love jails so much I have Firefox inside of jail and that jail is also inside a jail. Documentation is also a huge + and the BSD community is very nice and helpful.

One thing I do not like tho, is that there are more performance patches for Linux then there is for BSD, I would love to have BFS and BFQ on BSD. But to be fair BSD stock is as fast as necessary to get things done, so it does not realistically need those.

Also on side note, where do people upload there custom BSD kernel patches, I can not seem to find any.

Most BSD's recommend using the stock kernel, if you do build your own kernel, you will be on your own, as they don't tend to support home builds, they expect you to know what you are doing. ;)

I too want to dabble my feet with OpenBSD.

Want to dabble with BSD - just use a pendrive install to learn without having to give it a partition until you are ready. :)

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad U410 and I tried installing OpenBSD on it. Unfortunately it kept telling me my wifi remote was turned off. (Which it wasnt). I do not think its the fault of the OS, I just believe it could be a problem with my hardware cause FreeBSD had the same problem.