I'm a Linux user myself, just testing the BSD waters, so to speak.
Thusfar I'm very impressed. The ports system is indeed very easy. And the pkg_* commands are easy and fast.
I do recommend that you look for hardware compatibility though. Not everything that ran under Linux runs under BSD (and vice versa). My old 450mhz machine boots in less then one and a halve minute, and has wireless internet out of the box. But my new machine spits out errors like there is no tomorrow, boots in the same one and a halve minute, and has no internet whatsoever. Not wired, not wireless, and there are no modules for the set of hardware I have. I can get sound working quite easily on this box, which in turn is a pain in Linux. So it's 1:1 I guess
or 2:1 for BSD if we consider how my old machine screams.
Differences in commands? Yeah. 'lspci' now is 'scanpci' for example. Both wired and wireless interfaces can be commanded by 'ifconfig'. And I didn't know 'dhclient' but that proved quite useful
But many things I've found where similar enough. I believe there are no more runlevels, that sort of things. X works the same as far as I can tell. ssh does the same.
The install was quite easy, although it left me with, I believe, fvwm as the only GUI. Nothing a pkg_add xfce4 couldn't fix. I must say that I did encounter a lot of small obstacles that I would not have gotten over so easily if it wasn't for my other machine so I could read the handbook. Most of my new found wisdom comes from that source.
PS. Pardon my English, I'm Dutch
