There are a lot of good reasons to replace ALSA. For one thing, software developers who target more than one OS had to support ALSA for Linux and OSS for basically everything else. For another, ALSA's back end management is kind of inconsistent and overly complex. The architecture is just suboptimal, by all accounts.

> On the BSD side, it primarily remains hardware support that holds me back. If FreeBSD decided to drop Nvidia's drivers in a non-free repository.. I'd have to take a much longer look.

The last couple weeks constitute the first time I've ever really had any hardware issues with FreeBSD. Now that I'm "forced" to use a Linux-based system, I'm beginning to wonder if dealing with the shortcomings of FreeBSD hardware support for this laptop would be the lesser evil.