[vermaden]

I have tried many many systems, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris (and recently OpenIndiana), MacOSX, Windows XP, Windows 7, ...

From all of them I have chosen FreeBSD because it sucks less then all the others.

My thoughs on these systems:

Linux
- I do not even consider that mess as a solution, maybe Ubuntu to not watch under the hood and scream

NetBSD
+ pkgin 'infrastructure'
+ XEN dom0
+ will have ZFS at some time
+ suspend/resume works better then on FreeBSD
- bad sound architecture (will be fixed in NetBSD 6.0)
- pkgsrc often break and packages are not available for everything
- no Opera for NetBSD (can be thru Linux compatibility)
- no virtualbox
- mature XEN domU

OpenBSD
+ suspend/resume works better then on FreeBSD
- too basic services management (no /etc/rc.d and /usr/local/etc/rc.d)
- no virtualbox
- no Opera
- small amount of packages
- sometimes VERY OLD packages

FreeBSD
+ virtualbox
+ native Opera
+ mature ZFS
+ a lot of packages and working ports infrastructure
- suspend/resume does not work

OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana
+ latest ZFS
+ Zones
+ virtualbox
+ Comstar (iSCSI)
+ nice wireless/wifi setup in console with dladm (better then wpa_supplicant)
- no native Opera
- almost no packages at all even with additional repositories
- very slow and memory hungry
- no as clean/ordered as BSDs (check output of mount without arguments and various bin directories spread across the filesystem)

Mac OSX
+ nice GUI but after using it a while You still find same 'inconsistencies' as in GNOME/KDE
+ virtualbox (and many others)
+ native Opera
+ nice *.app 'format' for applications
- everything that is not an 'official' is pretty hard to setup (wine)
- no real filesystem for serious storage (like ZFS)
- SICK keyboard shortcuts/layout!
- often limited to Apple hardware but You can also setup a hackintosh on PC

Windows XP/Windows 7
+ virtualbox (and others)
+ native Opera
+ wine not needed
- no real filesystem for serious storage (like ZFS)
- not very CLI/scripting friendly (but possible thru *.bat|*.cmd)

... in the end I have settled on FreeBSD, but experience from the systems above was also helpful, nice to know what other OSes offer.