On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 10:16:56AM -0800, Jason wrote: > Happy Friday all: > > Are there many FreeBSD users on the list? I had > experience with FreeBSD many moons ago, and have > pretty much only dealt whith Open on the BSD side of > things for the last 3 or 4 years (and OS X for the > last year or so). > > Having read through the recent BSD vs. Linux or "BSD > for Linux Users" rant at: > http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php > there are several things that have reminded me about > how nice FreeBSD is to use. > > Does anyone have any personal opinions on using > FreeBSD as a primary OS? Or, any thoughts on using > OpenBSD vs. FreeBSD? I am most interested in things > from a desktop perspective, though any thoughts are > appreciated.
I have been using OpenBSD as my primary OS for a couple years. In the last week or so I've installed Net and Free BSD (concurrently) on my Tecra 8000. I think FreeBSD offers more features for a desktop. For example FreeBSD has ALSA sound drivers, and more hardware drivers in general. But I found it a little more difficult to configure X and my PCMCIA card doesn't work as smoothly under Free as it does under Net or Open. I think FreeBSD is more difficult to maintain than Net or Open ... more abstract configuration, doesn't have a manpage every driver, etc. FreeBSD is more open to using GPL sources, if that's of any consequence to you. I haven't had a good initial reaction to FreeBSD's ports. It seems there is a mechanism to call su to install the software, but it doesn't always get called before the port tries to install, and make dies. Very annoying, since I've never even see that on OpenBSD. Of course FreeBSD has more ports. Personally, I think if I really need some feature that's not in Open or Net, then I'd probably just use Linux, since it has even more desktop features and even more software ready to run. That being said, I still use OpenBSD as my primary OS, even for desktops. Heck, I even have transcode and mjpegtools running on my OpenBSD machines. I just don't want to give up the basic simplicity of OpenBSD administration. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
