So I’ve read articles about how the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port is nothing but a ‘toy OS’ and that Debian should focus on other things instead.

Well, I have to disagree. One of the awesome things about Debian, is that it tries to keep all its platforms in sync, like NetBSD. It has like 60+ ports, and that’s one of the reasons releases take so long. That being said, the state of this port is entirely dependent upon what you want to use it for.

As a desktop OS, it’s got some rough edges yet. DBus is not quite right, so things don’t quite work perfectly. XFCE desktop is nice, but logout doesn’t work correctly. I had to use xdm instead of lightdm. Little things like that. On the upside, flash kinda works (gnash) and my sound worked out of the box. (This is on my Dell laptop.) Wheezy is greatly improved over Squeeze in the respect of things working right in kFreeBSD. So I think by the time the release is ready, it will be fairly usable.

The installer is better now, zfs root works, it’s pretty speedy on an SSD. Boot-up time is comparable to Linux 3.0 with Ubuntu 10.10. (I was running the older release for some video conferencing software that broke after I upgraded X, so I will probably update to something like Linux Mint 12 at some point…)

As a server OS, I have no idea, but I’m planning on testing it on a few things later today. I think it will do well in the capacity that I want to use it for.

-Matt