Whenever I hear "BSD" I always think: "if you want to use BSD you have to build a machine for it". This isn't really based on any real world experience, but whenever BSD comes up as a topic only thing that sticks with me is: "it only likes very specific hardware" which makes me very hesitant to ever consider trying it. I've had so many hardware incompatibility problems with Ubuntu, which is suppose to support almost everything, I don't even wanna think about trying to run BSD.
It's strange, I have heard lots of people complain who wanted to give Linux a try (over Windows) and ran into hardware issues.
On the other hand, over the last ~15 years, I have almost never checked if a piece of hardware is supported by Linux (or BSD) before buying it, and I have only run into problems twice, really. One was an Aureal Vortex sound card for which a driver was maintained outside the Linux kernel tree, so I had to download it and build the module manually; the other was a really crappy HP scanner. Ironically, these days it does work on Linux much better (meaning: at all) than on Windows. (One key factor, though, seems to be not using brand-new hardware. After a year or so, chances are much* better it is supported properly.)
Apart from that, I have had no problems at all. Maybe I was just really lucky.
GPUs have been the pain of my Linux existence, everything else is generic enough to work, but last time I tried Ubuntu the default settings manager crashed at the mere sight of my GPU and when I installed a differed WM either couldn't find the resolutions I wanted to run or they didn't stick around after booting. After messing around with some "xorg-edgers" drivers I ended up with machine which claimed it had no displays anywhere and I just gave up and installed Windows.
It always seems to be one thing or another. Either it's some program/service I use daily that doesn't work (or doesn't quite work as well as I know it can) or it's some strange issue with sound or most likely GPU
Hardware can actually be a mixed bag between BSD and Linux. In my experience (which is several years dated by now), BSDs seemed to do better with various less popular WiFi chipsets.
I remember having trouble with wifi chipsets ~5-6 years ago when smaller netbooks started to hit the scene. I had one of thous, like 8" laptops with brand new ARM chip and 4 hour battery life, for it getting wifi working was hard, but after that I haven't had much trouble with wifi, but maybe I've just been lucky.
