Linux too vanilla? Try PC-BSD desktop system. Liam Proven has published a review for PC-BSD desktop os:

I’VE BEEN TRYING to reinstall my old laptop recently. It’s a battered old Thinkpad i1200 series from about 2001. It was a basic, economy-model machine: no Ethernet, no floppy, no serial, no infra-red, single Type 3 Cardbus slot; don’t even ask about wireless or Bluetooth. Alas, no kernel newer than 2.6.15 will run on it, regardless of combinations of irqpoll and noapic and nolapic and disabling ACPI and so on.

So, getting increasingly desperate, I thought I’d give PC-BSD a whirl. This is a distro of FreeBSD tweaked for an easy desktop install.

Read the rest of the PC-BSD review…