Well, the Intel DRM driver is pretty closely tracking linux upstream and most desktop stuff just works, so you could say it's a viable alternative. But it doesn't have DTrace or ZFS, although it has LUKS/dm-crypt for compatibility with Linux and the Hammer1 filesystem provides most of ZFS (missing some important bits) while requiring much much less RAM. You can actually dedup your Hammer filesystem with little RAM. Matt's been working for a long time on Hammer2 and it's still under heavy development. The message passing, less sharing concurrency in the kernel allowed Dragonfly to be competitive with Linux in benchmarks with just a few developers and a simpler kernel locking scheme altogether. DTrace is the number one feature I miss compared to FreeBSD, but other than that it's great. But FreeBSD gets a lot more contributions so is a much safer bet for production and they're also well on their way to have a linux abstraction layer for quicker sync of kernel drm drivers. So they will soon close up to Dragonfly in terms of Intel and Radeon graphics support. Also FreeBSD gets official Nvidia binary drivers if you need them and they have a kernel driver ABI that doesn't require you to rebuild nvidia.ko.
cm3|9 years ago