FreeBSD and OpenBSD are pretty great OSs too. I wonder if their share isn't so tiny because BSD enthusiasts have an easy option of running a Mac and still have access to BSD tools under the hood.
I tried really really hard to like FreeBSD, and I did like it... It's not just a server OS it's true! but omg the hardware support, that made me truly appreciate that the common denominator of an Desktop OS being useable: is hardware support...
it doesn't matter how amazing the OS is abstractly, you need drivers to appreciate it.
I even started going down the road of submitting driver patches, and I am no OS programmer. That's how dedicated I was to making it work - but there's just too much to do.
I know if you are super careful you can buy hardware for *BSD but even then it's unlikely you will get support for everything in the BSDs, Linux just has support for so much out of popularity, and in a closed hardware world unfortunately that is what makes a Desktop OS usable (without even getting into DE/WM stuff).
Yea and the driver situation for laptops on FreeBSD doesn't help. I've never had problems installing FreeBSD on server or desktop hardware, but on laptops either the wifi doesn't work or suspend and resume doesn't work, or of course both. But this reflects the goals FreeBSD so one shouldn't really be that surprised.
edit: Typo.