As someone who has run Linux and FreeBSD desktops for years -- no, Linux on the desktop is actually quite a bit better and easier to use than FreeBSD.

As someone who actually started learning *NIX on BSDs and later switched to Linux, I think "quite a bit better and easier" is an understatement. I tried the latest FreeBSD last year on a not so recent Lenovo laptop and it was a horrible experience.

Some people are just bad at this.

Clearly OSX is not ready for the desktop yet.

There are a few gripes about the discoverability of the keyboard shortcuts. Unity was good with this, holding down the Win/Meta key showed all the DE shortcuts.

Also, there is not an easy way to change certain settings (like system font!) without installing an obscure package "Tweaks" that should be built into the system settings.

* When using Wayland, until VERY recently (latest nvidia drivers), the entire system would freeze when hooking up an external monitor. Okay, no problem I’ll use X.

* Hygrid graphics just completely doesn’t work, loads of glitches, glacially slow framerates on external monitors, etc. Okay, I turn off hybrid graphics in the BIOS, but that absolutely trashes battery life.

* X does not let you run different scale factors concurrently. You can’t set your laptop screen to 2x and your external monitor to 1x. Wayland does let you, but see above.

* I have two 4K monitors hooked up to my laptop. Whenever I resume from sleep, there’s a very good chance that only one or zero of the monitors is detected. They both power on, but only one (or sometimes none) of them actually has a signal. Cycling power on the monitor usually fixes the issue. My coworker has a Thinkpad from the same line but a generation earlier, and it had the exact same problem, so this has apparently been around a while and still isn’t fixed.

Well, that's your first problem. How does FreeBSD or OSX do on it? Maybe you should buy a Linux laptop to run Linux instead of slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work correctly.

Try Intel or AMD; they are a lot more stable in my experience.

Yes, but only since very recently — AFAIK, most distros are not using the open-source drivers yet, as they don’t yet have feature parity with the proprietary ones.

umanwizard's reply is interesting.

Also - I have been using Linux for 26 years, if that matters. However, on the desktop I largely moved to macOS (then called OS X) in 2003.

But FreeBSD is great as a desktop for tinkerers — if you want something that’s simple enough that you can actually understand how it works, and whose source code you can quite easily jump into, modify, and rebuild, it blows Linux out of the water.

That said, I still have a Linux system for things like gaming, Cuda, and containers. Though, as I never have time to game anyways, I could just use the Linux system as a server.

But, I've used Linux for 10+ years and it only started annoying me recently so I may also get frustrated with freeBSD eventually.