I was just throwing out some desktop-specific things at the end and have no interest in running any BSD as a desktop anymore.

They all suffer from the good enough but not mainstream enough problem, i.e. official Nvidia drivers that are not officially supported.

I never really saw BSD as a desktop operating system, regardless what OSX achieved with Darwin.

It made for an amazing mailserver last I tried it though. I used 3.4 on an ancient P4 with maybe 256MB of RAM an 8GB hard drive. Turns out that was way more computer than it needs, and it was so stable I began to think of it the same way I think of my router.

The Radeon stuff is improving rapidly. You can't buy a diesel truck for the power and then complain that it won't take gasoline. ;-)

To hell w/ NVidia. If they won't play ball, I'll spend my money on an arguably slightly lesser performing product that is more open.

Though, currently the linux emulation layer in CURRENT has a change that broke the linux Flash binary. I've been flash-free for about 2 weeks now. I can't decide if that's a curse or liberation. Otherwise, I personally think FreeBSD is a mighty fine desktop OS. ZFS is really nice.

Nvidia actually provides drivers for FreeBSD, which have worked well for me so far. Nothing on the ATI side, though.

And I don't think the users of other BSDs have much need for 3D acceleration..

Eh? I run OpenBSD as a "desktop" and I use 3D acceleration to play 3D games and all that stuff. Even playing videos these days requires DRI support in the kernel. With a bit of careful hardware selection, 3D acceleration works out of the box on OpenBSD.

You said it best the first time when you said you missed pf.

Openbsd was never meant to not be a desktop OS.

> OpenBSD was never meant to be a desktop BSD.

Where would people find this out? Has anyone listed the BSDs and said which task each was meant for? Are there any good BSD-to-BSD comparisons being done now?

Lots of people have listed the BSDs and said which task each was meant for. Lots of people have also been completely wrong. There's a whole internet of misinformation out there if you're really interested.

Yes, of course, but there is a general aim and focus among the developers of the three main flavors, that is prevalent in the capacities of said flavors:

NetBSD - portability. OpenBSD - security. FreeBSD - performance and usability.

With that said, no, that definitely does not mean that each flavor can't stand out in the other two fields. Heck, I used OpenBSD as my desktop OS for 2 years on and off, so I know very well how capable it is "off field", and looking at the most popular flavor in BSD-powered server parks we see FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD contrary to what logic might try to dictate.