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DesktopBSD....looks like Linux

What you see when you look at a desktop PC running BSD or Linux is the desktop aka windowing software, which for most folks is either KDE or Gnome. The underlying operating system kernel can be either BSD or Linux, and the command line tools beloved by us old hackers will be a rich variety of stuff, including quite a few important tools such as the GNU C compiler (gcc) and the emacs editor.

The end user of a GUI desktop will not know whether it's a Linux or BSD kernel. With a little experience, they will notice whether it is KDE or Gnome.

The word "Linux" has also come to mean the combination of a Linux kernel plus the GNU (and many others) tools and either KDE or Gnome desktop software. Which is fine; only purists refuse to recognize the way that words morph meaning over time.

If your hardware is supported and if you aren't pushing some of the security and stability features more often seen on the BSD side, then you won't see much difference.

Linux kernels cover a wider variety of hardware, and are evolving at a faster (much faster in recent times) rate. So for special hardware like embeddeds (e.g. Tivo and Linksys routers) and 512 processor monsters (e.g. SGI Altix), Linux is the only way to go. BSD just doesn't evolve fast enough to cover these new hardware platforms. But for web servers, BSD provides a rock solid, secure platform that is hard to beat without alot of custom work.

The other key difference between BSD and Linux is their source license. The BSD license has fewer strings attached - you don't have to provide others with the source code for your changes when you release product using such licensed software. This has led to Linux remaining a single code base, covering an extremely wide range of systems, from wrist watches to the worlds largest supercomputers, while BSD has tended to fracture into a few competing variants covering a narrower range of platforms.