One piece of fun trivia, Patrick works for iXsystems so Slackware and FreeBSD are happy siblings.
I used FreeBSD on a laptop for a year. The only problem was suspend/resume which I never got going. When I mention this people say they have gotten it working, so probably it's me failing at it. But if I knew I could get it working, I'd switch back without giving it a second thought, by far the best experience using a Unixy OS I had so far.
I'm leaning towards FreeBSD lately, and when it's Linux at work it's necessarily RHEL due to company standardization etc, but Slackware is where the heart is, and will always be.