I thought I would give FreeBSD a try in a VirtualBox machine. My initial attempt proved bland and failed partially due to a dying hard drive. I decided to try again using Gentoo FreeBSD and that proved to be better looking, but less useful than a standard FreeBSD install. What's the point if it's not possible to install a window manager in the normal way? I finally found a FreeBSD 'distro' called GhostBSD. It's looking a lot better than FreeBSD because it comes standard with MATE (a fork of gnome2) and a graphical installer. Plus, it is FreeBSD, so it uses FreeBSD ports. FreeBSD ports has boinc-7.2.28. FreeBSD also has the option to run linux apps with emulation, so it's looking like it might be a fun thing to try. So far, the install has gone pretty smoothly and currently in the process of a boinc install attempt.
Will report back when I have more info.