For more than forty years of my life, I've been serving Christ. There are more stories there than several books can tell. Since I've read stories from the lives of others written far better, and more useful to building individual faith, than I could do, I'll confine myself to a little piece of my story here. It will be a little piece not often addressed in the stories of others, how faith trumps the politics and religious devotion many have to various expressions of high technology.
It's nothing personal, you see. Human Resource (HR) directors don't hire people; actually, they hire skill sets. Naturally, that skill set includes the ability to get along, a skill even the most evil sociopath can learn. It's not how good someone is, but whether they exhibit a certain ability to perform. It's strictly dollars for a product, even if that product is a complex of human interaction. If you could get a robot to do the job for less money, the robot would be used.
Those of us observing GNU/Linux over the past decade have spent so much time talking about how “next year is Linux’s year on the desktop” that it has become more of a humorous cliché than a useful statement. Nevertheless, while every year the Penguin has disappointed us in not quite readying itself to compete against Apple and Microsoft’s systems, at least in the small office and home office market, we can always cling to the eternal hope: next year. Or can we?
You've installed FreeBSD, and it works fine, of course. If you are as seriously committed to using it as your desktop as I am, you'll want to get the most out it. Let's go hardcore! The key with FreeBSD is optimization -- tweaking the compile process so the resulting binary code runs as efficiently as possible.
Consumer grade machines with 64-bit processors have been around for the past three years. At first it meant nothing, since the ones you could buy off the shelf came with 32-bit Windows XP. However, that's still the case, as 64-bit Windows drivers have lagged for most consumer hardware. Not so in the Open Source world, where the greatest source of complaints -- poor or missing drivers for some hardware -- is its greatest strength in the 64-bit arena.