Well, some ham gear comes with a certain amount of lock-in on the software you can use. In some cases, that can mean a windows-only environment. A few protocols are open or have been reverse engineered. So - I'd look at all of those details before I made any decision about gear.
The thing that is all the rage now is SDR (software defined radio). There is a ham transceiver called "Flex" that is very oriented towards this, but there are others.
You don't need a radio at all to start experimenting with ham + software + internet. Just install fldigi (open source digital ham software) on your BSD or Linux box, and go to:
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
Then, turn on your speakers and tune around the HF bands with your mouse. The utwente site/app has full coverage short-wave, with multi-user capability (usually over a hundred people are logged in at any given time).
If you have oss, port audio or pulse (alsa), you can redirect the audio from the websdr (above) to fldigi, and watch bpsk31 digital conversations, as well as others. You may need jackd, depending. Easiest is pulse (runs out of the box).
You need a browser with full HTML5 audio (webAudio API) to do this. Some browsers have only enough HTML5 audio to do YT. Vivaldi is one that works for me on the referenced site. It's in beta test though - so user uses at own risk. Some versions of Firefox and Chrome also work. Internet explorer does not.