Comment by ggm

It might be some people's reason. I got to a point where I couldn't even get decent 2D X behaviour, and DSDT configs for laptops stopped working, or even depended on Linux to get them working. It was a signal. Van Jacobsen dropping primary development of his TCP work in BSD and moving to Linux was another signal to me, maybe some others.

Overwhelmingly I think desktop support and the Ubuntu/LTE effect did it: FreeBSD demanded more of you, to get it to work. The working outcome I still like, but commodity UNIX is just simpler from OSX, or from Ubuntu. And vendors back it enough to mean you can get more things to work, more quickly, closer to the cutting edge. I am pretty sure I will get a working Linux desktop on any laptop I plausibly buy next time. I believe 80% of things will work fine in FreeBSD but the last 20% (Synaptics driver, fingerprint driver, TPM driver, blob-ridden WiFi Driver...) are going to be hard.