"if there's a big public repository of prebuilt binary packages for the latest (9.1) release, I am not aware of it" FreeBSD had a security breach shortly befor

"if there's a big public repository of prebuilt binary packages for the latest (9.1) release, I am not aware of it" FreeBSD had a security breach shortly before 9.1.. so some of their hardware was offline. So packages were not available at release. They expect to make them available at some point. Then you can install out of date packages (since packages are frozen at release), and rebuild half of them to fix security or serious bugs. "I have heard good things about PC-BSD" I have also heard good things about PC-BSD. I've played with it a bit, and it seems promising. I haven't used it enough to recommend it.. but it seems like it's worth a try if you need a FBSD desktop. Definitely more promising than the other BSD desktop efforts I've seen over the years (all of which are dead AFAIK).