Basically, if you want bleeding-edge, Linux is a better platform to go for, and it's pretty stable as well, even Ubuntu Unity's gotten really nice in 13.04, from the perspective of a guy who uses the Unity spin of that distro with his hardware currently and really digs it.
However BSD's been in the game for a bit longer, and has a smaller, more mature and close-knit community than Linux, and they emphasize more on the maturity and stability of their OS as far as packages go as well, however the downside to BSD is it's a bit harder to use if you're used to some form of Linux as you have to compile most stuff in it, however you can install from packages in it too, in that way, Linux isn't much different as in some distros, ie. Gentoo or LFS, you have to compile everything from source, in distros like Arch, you can either compile from source or install from binaries, meanwhile distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Debian get their stuff mostly from binaries.
However there are desktop-oriented forms of BSD out there, most notably PC-BSD, which take a similar approach to Ubuntu in that they make BSD as easy to use as possible, and as accessible as possible to people that are new to the platform
Ultimately though, it's just a matter of preference, I for example, prefer Linux for the focus on having the newest stuff, and 'cause I'm accustomed to it the most, specifically Ubuntu or Debian-type distros, while others may prefer BSD for the stability of the packages.