One thing I hate in FreeBSD...

One thing I hate in FreeBSD - is the speed of maintainence operations.
To install (or upgrade) one port you have to wait half an hour...
To update system with custom kernel/userland parameters, you should wait several hours... Then you call mergemaster, which asks you a dozen questions about config files (and most of changes doesn't impact on the current system, but just in case there is something important, you have to review them).
Comparing to "do-release-upgrade" on ubuntu, the speed of operation is unberable. And binary updates just don't do everithing you need (e.g. dtrace world, necessary ports options...)

Read UPDATING, Luck...

I spent weekend updating my desktop system. I've built 8.2, updated Xorg, KDE and different trifles. Finally I reinstalled autoconf,automake,libltdl,libtool, because portmaster couldn't update them (ports moved). Periodically I had to kill grep during port install, because I forgot to update portmaster. These two problems could be solved if I had read "UPDATING"... But the last one was interesting: I didn't manage to make xf86-video-ati work, system hanged with "radeon" driver and performance dropped significantly with "radeonhd". At last, I rolled back to using x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati613. I have to update other major ports (OpenJDK, Chromium, Firefox), but this can wait. I'm going to wait for Chromium 9 (which was promised to land in ports tree in March-April) and to replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice on this week...