Yahoo is still using FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is also used by ISPs (NYI, Pair, Verio), storage companies (NetApp, EMC), internet infrastructure companies (Cisco, Juniper), hedge funds (not sure if I should mention names), antivirus companies (probably shouldn't mention names), large defence contractors, several US national laboratories...

There are permanent FreeBSD deployments on every continent (yes, including antarctica) and in some of the most remote regions on earth (when the European Southern Observatory in Chile needed to send data wirelessly over 100 km, they used FreeBSD).

Yes, people still use BSD.

And maybe Tarsnap?;) Thx for the excellent answer.

EC2 has no support for BSD, if my cursory search was right, and Tarsnap runs partially on an EC2 instance.

The Tarsnap server isn't running on FreeBSD (yet...) but a very large portion of the Tarsnap client code comes from the libarchive library, which grew out of FreeBSD. Whether that counts or not is a matter of opinion.

Most of the unix userland tools of MacOSX come from FreeBSD.

Airport Extreme and Time Capsule run NetBSD.

OpenSSH (http://openssh.org/) grew out of OpenBSD, and that's used pretty widely (http://www.openssh.com/users.html).

Several components of OS X are directly from FreeBSD.

Yes I know that, so it's probably worth the time to look into a newer FreeBSD release. I wonder if it works well on a laptop.

I run FreeBSD CURRENT on my MacBook Pro with a light tiling window manager. It is not as featured as Linux but it does run decently. Wireless configuration is done through editing wpa_supplicant.conf and restarting netif, suspend/resume don't work correctly, I haven't yet configured my audio to switch output from either the headphones or the speakers without having to edit /boot/device.hints and restarting, and a handful other things, for example. On the other hand, 9.0-CURRENT has included many new drivers for things like the Apple touchpad (atp(4)). Support for desktop use is slow, but it isn't ignored.

I would highly recommend you scrutinize your hardware compatibility before committing to an install on a desktop or laptop system.

FYI, OpenBSD -current wireless works like this:

    ifconfig ral0 nwid my_router wpakey my_password

No wpa_supplicant!

I used PC-BSD (which kind of is to FreeBSD what Ubuntu is to Debian) for a while on my laptop. I really liked the system as a whole, but I had some issues with wireless support, and found KDE a bit sluggish (very low RAM on my laptop). But it's certainly worth a try - if you can get everything to work right, it's a very nice system.