Depends on how you intend to use it. In my scenario I initially planned to dual-boot FBSD/Windows 8.1 but found a different solution.
In January 2014 I acquired a MS Surface Pro 2. Display is 1920x1080, and it has 8G ram/245G SSD. A problem dual booting is FBSD didn't do Secure Boot, which meant a hassle switching back into Win8.1. SB would have to be disabled to install/run FBSD, and Win8.1 wants SB to be enabled.
However the SP2/Win8.1 came with client Hyper-V. Fortunately running FBSD in a HV VM was pretty easy to do. In fact FBSD is distributed as a VHD image making installation dead simple.
Running FBSD in a VM works well for my purposes, primarily developing web servers and server-side systems. It's quite useful to run the server in the VM and use a browser on the host OS to connect to it (e.g., for testing, etc.).
Surprisingly, an X server and GUI desktop running in the VM are reasonably responsive, and not a problem editing stuff with Emacs once fonts and the like are adjusted to taste.
Anyway we know mileage varies (a lot), but this kind of setup has its merits. In my case, with far fewer moving parts to juggle it's proven to be a useable alternative to dual booting.
Upon reading your post, it strikes me how archaic it seems to install any OS these days. It would be awesome if every OS was available as a base VM image that worked out of the box (networking, video, audio, etc.), ready to enhance and customize. I wouldn't even want a host OS beyond what is needed to manage the hypervisor.
In January 2014 I acquired a MS Surface Pro 2. Display is 1920x1080, and it has 8G ram/245G SSD. A problem dual booting is FBSD didn't do Secure Boot, which meant a hassle switching back into Win8.1. SB would have to be disabled to install/run FBSD, and Win8.1 wants SB to be enabled.
However the SP2/Win8.1 came with client Hyper-V. Fortunately running FBSD in a HV VM was pretty easy to do. In fact FBSD is distributed as a VHD image making installation dead simple.
Running FBSD in a VM works well for my purposes, primarily developing web servers and server-side systems. It's quite useful to run the server in the VM and use a browser on the host OS to connect to it (e.g., for testing, etc.).
Surprisingly, an X server and GUI desktop running in the VM are reasonably responsive, and not a problem editing stuff with Emacs once fonts and the like are adjusted to taste.
Anyway we know mileage varies (a lot), but this kind of setup has its merits. In my case, with far fewer moving parts to juggle it's proven to be a useable alternative to dual booting.