FreeBSD has no solid power management, especially lacks support for hibernation to disk.
It also does not have much for video conferencing.
Firefox and Opera are both available. IE requires trickery with wine emulator.
Stardict is included, others run or not via wine.
Actually i would propose Linux instead - it has hibernation to disk, fairly complete webcam support like for skype, same browsers as FreeBSD and Flash is not crashing them, it automatically mounts USB flash sticks without enormous effort like in *BSD. 32bit version better than 64bit - but if you have huge disk and RAM >2G you can choose to take this adventure.
You can run some LiveCD of Linux - like Mandriva One, OpenSUSE or Ubuntu to check out how well it does (you can install lots of software in its ramdisk, or run pieces from your hard disk)
What will be initial confusion - there is no C: D: E: etc, all files are in same unified namespace.
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by: cyberstalkerPosted on 2009-07-23 at 02:58:35ID: 24923341
Can you tell me if there is any particular reason you are looking at FreeBSD specifically as an alternative to Windows?
I am asking this because there are many different flavors of UNIX/Linux out there, all with a lot of similarities, but also with their different goals and a completely different user experience.
For example, if you are just looking at BSD, there are many variants. The major ones you can find at http://www.bsd.org/
If you are looking at linux as well, there are litterally thousands of distributions out there.
Every operating system out there allows you to browse the web, so using search engines is definitely not going to be a problem. Using the software you use now on Windows may or may not work. There is a program called Wine which allows you to run Windows software on UNIX/Linux. However, this program is not perfect and not all software works correctly in this.
At http://appdb.winehq.org/ you can see if the program is listed and if so, whether it is supported.
If this proves difficult, can you post a list of programs you use, and I can look for you whether they will work.