Actually, Darwin is based on Carnegie-Mellon's Mach kernel with a FreeBSD 3.x (as I recall...) userland on top. Mach is a completely different kernel than those found in any of the *BSD family members.

could be, the only thing i know for sure is the OSX is closer to OpenStep than it is to BSD.

FreeBSD 5.x

I have used FreeBSD for a number of years as a server, and I am now considering installing it on a desktop box. Although I really hate closed-source software, I do need to use Skype occasionally. Have people any luck running it on FreeBSD x86_64?

Also, what about Flash (hack, spit)?

I've had both skype and flash working on FreeBSD/amd64.

Adam

You can run almost all linux binaries on a FreeBSD system using the emulators/linux_base-f10 port
Guide for setting it up: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html

Pretty straight forward, it allows you to run most linux (i686) binaries, even on x86_64 FreeBSD.
The only ones i have needed to use in the past are "adobe flash" and it works pretty well.

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not only that, but given the proper libraries/headers + gcc, automake and autoconf, you can compile almost any source code written for Linux on BSD as well, sans emulator, the same can be even said for OS X (though as stated before, OS X is technically not BSD, not even the underlying Darwin OS)

it isn't really a matter of whether or not BSD can be used as a desktop OS, the question is how easily novice computer users/windows converts can use it as such (though that issue is really irrelevant as that isn't the target audience of BSD now is it)

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+1

This is one of those "if you have to ask..." type of situations.

My advice to the OP: "Try it out...if it doesn't do what you want it to, use something else."

This post is for the benefit of people who are using google and finding this topic:

I'll post a big caveat for those who are interested in multimedia tools, especially MIDI and music composition.

BSDs do not use ALSA, so most applications that use ALSA won't work on BSD. As most of the audio/video applications of late are developed solely on Linux/ALSA, you'll find only outdated software that still run on OSS. Sadly this can be a deal-breaker for some like me who use tools like Timidity++ as a soft-synth and tools like Rosegarden to compose music.

Some time back, I tried a hell of a lot to get MIDI to work on FreeBSD but it was frustrating and worked only partially. Timidity++ works, but it has no ALSA sequencer client, meaning it can play MIDI files, but there appears to be no way to get it to work as a system wide software synthesizer. Also quite a few of the multimedia/sound apps in "ports" seem to be abandoned/outdated because of their sole reliance on ALSA.

However I believe Jack toolkit works on BSD. This should offer a ray of hope, I think.

Other caveats might include:

1. USB video class devices including webcams might not work (not sure how much development is going on in FreeBSD in relation to USB video devices. If anybody has updates on this, I'd be interested to know.

2. Drivers for pen tablet devices. I use a pen tablet to draw on the system and on Linux this works by using the Xorg evdev framework. This is not available on FreeBSD or any BSD as far as I know. Again, any updates on driver-support for pen tablet devices would be very useful to me.

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webcamd on FreeBSD should support all USB cameras supported on Linux.

Also, there's a port of alsa-plugins and alsa-lib to FreeBSD now. Though I don't think it impacts midi support at all, any application that can output PCM via libasound should work on FreeBSD. Audio will simply get redirected to /dev/dsp (or, if you'd prefer, you can configure libasound to use pulseaudio).

Adam

Good to know about the webcam support.

Actually is there is any way to get a soft-synth on FreeBSD which interfaces as a MIDI device to other MIDI-aware applications?

I might try FreeBSD again just to see if this works when I get the time to do so.

Sorry, that's beyond my level of knowledge :-) My experience with midi (on any OS) is simply playing games that use midi sound.

adam, I had researched the issue as late as 2010 and it appears that MIDI support is kind of a dead-end in the BSD OSes.

Here's a thread I actually created on the issue on the BSD forums:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=13998

Intense googling has revealed no solution as far as the MIDI / ALSA / Software Synth issue is concerned. I am not hopeful, as FreeBSD is not particularly a "multimedia" OS.

Soft synth works but there appears to be no way to "emulate" a MIDI device, ala the Timidity++ ALSa sequencer client.

The only ray of hope is that future versions of ALSA-dependent multimedia software use JACK or some other sound kit.

I'm running FreeBSD 8.2 in a Virtualbox VM and I run OpenBSD 5.0 with Fluxbox. I have never experienced a lighter, faster OS than OpenBSD.