2008/7/25 Charles P. Schaum
Well, I can only say this: My best experiences for "out of the box" functionality are from Ubuntu. Like Debian, they have taken TeXlive and broken it up into a number of packages to allow for some installation
Ahm - has Ubuntu done anything or are they just using the wonderful Debian packages?
I like FreeBSD, but its ports system does not seem to have the same philosophy as TeXlive, or there are just too few working on it there. I mean, if Debian can do it, why don't the clever duckies just look at a few build scripts... So there you either have to use the prebuilt FreeBSD binaries and install it yourself or build it from source, which I rather like to do anyway. I haven't tried on the other BSD's.
OpenBSD has a very good TL port; AFAIK the other BSDs are catching up. Best Martin