I have just completed the set up of FreeBSD 8.2 on my Asus A3H laptop and it is working better than Linux! When I am playing an MP3 with xmms, I can plug in earphones and still hear the music, with Ubuntu and every other distribution I have tried even Linux Mint 10, it would mute the sound and nothing would bring the music back except unplugging the headphones. And the xf86-video-intel driver works with the graphics hardware included with this laptop as well, I am running fluxbox and everything is good.
But the only reason I wanted to install this is that I only have 768MiB of RAM and Linux Mint 10 with Gnome is too bloated and slow for the poor laptop and had to go. I just had to build Xorg and friends from source with ports and now I have a properly performing laptop again, without having to install Windows XP. Linux Mint and Ubuntu are getting too bloated, OpenSuse 11.3 is not too bad though, I did a in place upgrade with [code]sudo zypper dup[/code] and after downloading and installing 1.89 GiB of data I upgraded my desktop system without having to use the Suse DVD. Sort of like sudo apt-get dist-upgrade on Ubuntu after changing the repositories to the newer release.
But FreeBSD deserves to be used as it is a worthy contender to the desktop OS throne, it just needs more work to support the Intel i3’s integrated graphics capability. But all good so far on the laptop front.
And my BSD tips page has been updated with some new information.