Arch has been consistently more breaky for me than Ubuntu. It is fashionable to bash Ubuntu but I have found it quite polished as long as you don't try to color outside the lines.
I have used FreeBSD on the desktop since 1996. I am not a system guru. I have never used an install guide. I only ever used the guided installer and just let it run. It has always just worked. But there is also nothing to be gained by using FreeBSD...because coloring inside the lines on FreeBSD means using their polished tools to manage your system. I never ended up exploring my system much because I never had to...sysinstall did it for me.
Indeed in the late 90s when Linux distros were immature, I recommended FreeBSD to people who wanted a "just works" approach that let them continue to be as systems-stupid as me.
I see Ubuntu as the best current manifestation of what FreeBSD always was for me...the quickest, friendliest path to get a unix-like OS on your computer with lots of good defaults and hand-holding.
I might be lucky but my current installations of Arch are very bug-free. (except for a could bugs in the software, but I just report those to the upstream developers and they get fixed) I remember the last time my system broke, it was when they merged /bin and /usr/bin. I then proceeded to read the news posting wrong and break my system. Then it was up to me to fix it and it took about an hour.
On my other computer I correctly followed the post and had no issues.
I use the gnome offline updates with no fear, just whenever I turn off my computer I check the "Install Updates" options when it is available. It is all beautifully seamless.
Yeah, Ubuntu was never like that for me: every 6 months my system would break in a new and exciting way, and I couldn't fix it. But that's just me. FBSD is a bit more like Arch with a nicer installer, IMHO: minimal, text-based, highly configurable, and well-documented.
Although Arch uses systemd now by default, which is bad. I've replaced it with OpenRC. http://systemd-free.org has instructions if you want to do it yourself.
Last month I installed OpenBSD on my laptop, and was frustrated with its boot time.
I'm using an SSD. Debian 8 with KDE boots up in a matter of seconds. OpenBSD on the other hand needed at least 20 seconds to boot up.
I had done some research at the time, and came to the conclusion that it was systemd that allowed Linux to boot up so fast.
IIRC, OpenRC supports parallel boot. s6 and runit definitely do. And none of those are Linux specific. In fact, there have been projects to run them on BSD.
I guess you're probably right, I usually boot up just once in the morning. The truth is, being a performance freak, I expected OpenBSD to fly on my current hardware.
After much tweaking and struggle I couldn't get the DBus working, hence couldn't install GNOME.
i3wm as my window manager and manual configuration of everything especially the wireless connection were too spartan for me. So I switched back to Debian 8 + KDE.
I use i3 regularly, but I don't use wifi much. Honestly though, using netbsd with wpa or wpa2 doesn't look too hard, and you can write a script to automate the worst of it. It's by no means the horror that is iw/iwconfig and wpa_supplicant (insert ritual chants of horror and disgust).
hmm does suspend not work for you? OpenBSD is quite laptop friendly, more so than the other BSDs I'd say. If you're booting every morning then I can understand it being a bit annoying.
OpenBSD is probably the worst when it comes to overall performance of all the BSDs, and Linux.
I have used FreeBSD on the desktop since 1996. I am not a system guru. I have never used an install guide. I only ever used the guided installer and just let it run. It has always just worked. But there is also nothing to be gained by using FreeBSD...because coloring inside the lines on FreeBSD means using their polished tools to manage your system. I never ended up exploring my system much because I never had to...sysinstall did it for me.
Indeed in the late 90s when Linux distros were immature, I recommended FreeBSD to people who wanted a "just works" approach that let them continue to be as systems-stupid as me.
I see Ubuntu as the best current manifestation of what FreeBSD always was for me...the quickest, friendliest path to get a unix-like OS on your computer with lots of good defaults and hand-holding.