Just for fun I've installed FreeBSD 6.0 on a laptop which was previously running SUSE 10.0 (512MB RAM). The installer hasn't really changed since I last looked years ago, and there are a few things that need to be tweaked by hand that SUSE would do automatically during the install (such as telling X that it's a British keyboard). There are a couple of other things that need to be fixed in order to feel at home (setting your shell to bash, making yourself a member of the group wheel).

Installing packages by FTP is very straightforward and dependencies all get fetched and installed automatically.

But the thing that stands out is that with roughly the same stuff running (KDE 3.4), FreeBSD is very noticably quicker: KDE itself, Konqueror, konsole and OpenOffice.org (late 1.9 version) all start much faster than on SUSE 10.0.