TechRepublic has a short review on PC-BSD 9.0 entitled PC-BSD: a BSD for the workstation.

The feature story in DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 441 is entitled Reviews: PC-BSD 9.0 “Isotope”.

If you’re aware of any other reviews, add a comment with the URL.

John R Davis Jr has written a review on his recent experiences with PC-BSD:

I recently have been experimenting with various Distributions; CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc… I am constantly installing distribution after distribution in my attempt to find the “perfect” distro for me. I am actually contemplating reviewing, or at least attempting to, review every Linux/BSD distro out there but that’s a story for another time and place. So I fired up my Firefox while I was running Fedora 13 and went to Distrowatch.com. After looking at the top distributions over the past 30 days, and ruling out the usual suspects, I remembered that I had met some of the folks involved with PC-BSD at the 2009 Ohio Linux Fest. I remembered how PC-BSD, at the time, seemed to be a very interesting product and had a very courteous representation. I located PC-BSD (number 35) and went out on a limb and decided to attempt to install PC-BSD. I went to pcbsd.org, downloaded the .iso, burnt it to a disk using k3b, and installed it on my Lenovo ThinkPad L412 (review coming soon).

The first boot into the installer was painless and what I would consider fairly easy to navigate….

You can read the rest of the review on his blog.

The feature story in this week’s edition of DistroWatch is a review, written by Jesse Smith, of the PC-BSD version of Bordeaux. From the review:

The Bordeaux Technology Group is a company specializing in compatibility software. Specifically, they work at making it as easy as possible to run Windows programs on the UNIX family of operating systems. Their Bordeaux tool is built to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana and Mac OS X. Bordeaux is, at its heart, a customized build of Wine. They take a recent version of Wine, add some special tools and test their build for compatibility against a group of popular Windows software. They then sell this bundle (along with support) for about US$20 – 25, much less than the typical cost of a Windows license. A few weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Tom, a member of the Bordeaux Technology Group, and he was kind enough to give me a copy of Bordeaux (PC-BSD edition) to test-drive.

LinuxBSDos.com has a review of PC-BSD 8.1. The review begins with:

PC-BSD 8.1 was released on July 20, 2010, roughly five months after version 8.0 was released. Some of the suggestions made in the review of PC-BSD 8.0 have been carried out in this latest release. In fact, the changes were made within one month of that review being published. It is an encouraging example of how some distro developers respond to suggestions (or critical reviews).

While I still think that PC-BSD is not yet ready for the masses, it is coming along very well. This review will offer another detailed look at some of the good and bad sides of this FreeBSD-based distribution, with the attendant recommendations and suggestions for improvement.

Let me begin by looking at the bright side of this distribution. And as always, it has to start with the …

Installation: PC-BSD’s installer is one of the most intuitive graphical installers available on any distribution – Linux or BSD. It is both simple and fully featured. It is not perfect, does not have some of the bells and whistles of Anaconda, the Fedora installer, but it is a lot better than the Ubuntu and Mandriva installers. One aspect of the PC-BSD installer that I especially favor, is that at every step, there is a Back and an Abort button.

You can read the complete review here.