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From: Terry Porter on 18 Apr 2010 05:22
On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:30:18 +0000, Indi wrote:

> On 2010-04-10, Ben Crowell <crowell10(a)lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the suggestion. I actually gave that a shot today, but ran
>> into lots of problems there as well. Having spent about a week's worth
>> of my spare time trying to get a usable desktop FreeBSD system, I've
>> decided that switching back to FreeBSD isn't the right option for me at
>> this point. The situation I'm encountering is pretty much the same one
>> that made me switch from FreeBSD to Ubuntu in 2006. Getting a full,
>> working desktop system with all the apps I want is just not something
>> that I can accomplish with the amount of time I'm willing to spend. I
>> thought that situation might have improved since 2006, since the
>> existence of PC-BSD seems to indicate that there is at least some
>> subset of the FreeBSD community that is interested in making it a
>> desktop system that's usable by ordinary users. But as far as I can
>> tell, the situation is actually about the same as before. FBSD on the
>> desktop might be a viable choice for the same type of power users who
>> use gentoo, but it's not a viable choice for me. Although there have
>> been severe quality problems with the last couple of Ubuntu releases, I
>> am still able to accomplish almost all of what I want to accomplish
>> using Ubuntu, because the desktop application packages are fairly
>> carefully maintained. There are problems at the OS level (the
>> Pulseaudio disaster, too much functionality that should be independent
>> of the choice of wm, but in fact is broken if you don't use Gnome), but
>> they're not so severe that I can't live with them.
>
> I'd like to encourage you to try with straight FreeBSD. Haven't tried
> PC-BSD, but FreeBSD really is excellent and IME the ports system works
> beautifully. I use it on several desktop and laptop machines, as well as
> several servers. It's much more solid than Ubuntu IMHO.

I second Indi's motion.

I'm a long term Linux user, and complete FreeBSD noob, but have always
admired the Ports system of the *BSDs.

I recently tried PC-BSD-8.0 and it installed quickly and presented me
with a KDE desktop, but the video card is a slow old Matrox, altho the
machine, a Dell SC430 is fairly fast with a dual core PentiumD and 1GB
ram. The end result was a desktop that was too slow for me.

Changing window managers seemed difficult with some help files suggesting
that KDE was tied into the design of PC-BSD, which is fair enough.

So today I installed FreeBSD-8.0, which was as easy as any distro I've
ever installed up to the CLI. A complete no brainer.

Then I read a short howto on what I needed to get X-Windows running, and
added hal and dbus to /etc/rc.conf.
IceWM was my light Window Manager of choice, and now X-Windows is working
perfectly.

Ports was then installed and updated. A couple of CLI commands was all
that took.
I then installed Google-Earth from Ports as it wasn't available via
"pkg_add -r <program>".

I watched in amazement as it pulled in the Fedora 10 base and installed
all the Linux apps required to run GoogleEarth under Linux emulation.

GoogleEarth now works perfectly, and is no slower on this Matrox old card
than it would be under native Linux, I think.

I have read a lot of stories claiming that FreeBSD is hard to set up as a
desktop over the years, and even believed them myself, but as a
experienced Linux user, I did not find that to be the case today.

How does FreeBSD compare difficulty wise to Linux distros I'm familiar
with ?

FreeBSD install; slightly harder than Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint8 but easier
than ArchLinux and Gentoo.
(in my opinion).



--
This quadcore running Gnu/Linux Archlinux 2009.08 X86_64 and posting via
Pan.
Get your Free copy NOW! www.archlinux.org/
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