Comment by brewmarche

My experiences from dabbling with it a few months ago:

In general everything needs to be compiled for FreeBSD, but the ports collection is quite extensive. For example you will find Firefox, wayland, GNOME, KDE, xfce, … even dotnet was on there.

Problems arise with properietary stuff like Spotify, Widevine DRM etc. However, FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (providing syscalls), dubbed ‘Linuxulator’. I managed to run the Spotify Linux desktop client but the Spotify website wouldn’t let me log in, didn’t research further. AFAIK the emulator is limited though, not implementing all syscalls.

There is also podman for FreeBSD and in addition to running FreeBSD containers (using Jails under the hood I guess?) it can run Linux containers as well (using the Linuxulator in addition then?).

It also comes with a hypervisor called bhyve if you want to run VMs

There is a handbook on their website describing how to set up a system (including desktop environment) if you want to give it a go.