My local FreeBSD machine is of the PCBSD flavor. It's been working pretty solidly, installed easily and in general has been working well. I had to do some development on the machine over the past few days, and so I've been using it pretty heavily. I have to say, the /usr/ports system is just a wonderful thing. We use a couple of libraries (curl and cryptopp) and installing them on Linux, Windows and MacOSX was a nightmare. But from the Ports it was a snap!
While you can use ports and packages in PC-BSD, they also have PBIs, which are completely self-contained packages, taking advantage of the massive amounts of hard drive space available these days. And Dru Lavigne has a nice article on how to create your own PBI. I think I'm going to do this for some packages I use, esp. Emacs. I can't believe there isn't an Emacs PBI yet!
ONLamp.com: Building Binary PC-BSD Packages
