That says everything about why FreeBSD isn't an option for me with my laptops... I like things to *work*.
lawl, I also wanted something I'd have no qualms about leaving in the trunk of my car when I work, I call it a win win on my part!
[/quote]
Typing this on a Mac Pro, so you know my tastes in laptops. But in general, I disagree...
As I see it, hardware is transient; ultimately disposable. The OS (and keyboard!) is what I interact with, and I've learned buy the hardware to best serve the OS. It doesn't hurt that I tend to build biggish systems, so I generally don't care about the latest driver needed to support some cost-cutting crapification of some subsystem.[1]
Coincidentally, the motherboard on my (FreeBSD) storage server died about a month ago, and I'm hoping I can make time to rebuild it this weekend, now that all the parts are finally in. While changing OSes at this point would be really painful (something like 22-ish TB of data on sitting on ZFS), I'm extremely happy with FreeBSD, and almost always have been since I started using it in the 90s, so making sure the hardware was compatible was a no-brainer.
So yah. Started rambling a bit, forgive an oldster. But my point is that you spend more of your precious time using your OS of choice than you do the hardware, which dies or becomes obsolete. So modulo a need for some specific hardware with OS requirements (I'm thinking proprietary data acquisition boards, some robotics platforms, that sort of thing), match your hardware to your OS.
[1] One painful exception to this is my main desktop. I'm running Ubuntu on it now, due to a highly aggravating conjunction of software/hardware that I went out on a limb with. Briefly, I'm running virtualized win7 on it to support win-only software, and configured VGA-passthrough for an Nvidia Quadro K4000. Due to complicated issues I didn't anticipate related to Nvidia being poopy-heads, and to the IOMMU and the way my PCI bus ended up configured, I had to patch the kernel with an Nvidia-specific hack as well as a PCI patch. Never figured out why, but I couldn't get the combination working on vanilla Debian, which is my preferred workstation OS, but could when I tried it with Ubuntu. (Also had some stupid issues with the Nvidia driver under virtualized Windows, but I expect that, because I'm so very not a Windows person.) And after ripping out Gnome and some of the other Ubuntu crap I don't like, it it close enough.