FreeBSD is an operating system - period.
It happens to excel at being a server platform.
With a little due diligence on the user's part - it makes a fairly decent desktop platform, esp. for developers, sysadmins and unix fanboys.
You want a great BSD desktop - Steve Jobs owns this little company called Apple and had the foresight to move to a BSD-based OS dubbed Darwin, atop which they slapped a pretty darn slick GUI.
Right tool for the right job, I say. If I want to play Bioshock, I boot into XP, if I want to do dev work or do infosec research, I boot to BSD.
Besides, the desktop persona of BSD is in the hands of the folks developing Xorg, Gnome, KDE and all the desktop apps and not necessarily within the control of those at FreeBSD.
My workstation (at work) is a BSD desktop (Xorg/Gnome) but due to the nature of business environments, I also have a notebook running XP Pro since I have to admin servers of all kinds. I think BSD makes for a good desktop platform, but I'm willing to put the work in. A slightly easier route but still unix would be Debian (IMO).
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