> On Thu 15 Feb 2007 00:46:01 NZDT +1300, Rik Tindall wrote: > >> Seems to me, if you really want to teach GNU/Linux, > Remind yourself Rik that Billy got hugely big while unix vendors were > peddling user-unfriendly stuff and peeing against each other. Linux/BSD > peeing contests are just repeating the same mistake and are not > productive. To make it plain, I'm not interested. A talk on what BSD > does for me on the desktop is not of much use either as far as I can > see, because I see already that all my applications which I need to get > semi-professsional work done on Linux aren't on BSD which ticks off BSD > for the bin at that point,
Just because BSD is ticked off the list for you right now doesn't mean it is an uninteresting topic, nor does it mean that BSD is not suitable on the desktop for others. I have FreeBSD on my laptop. In my particular area of interest (multimedia) I find the software available under the Ports system is more up to date than with most linux distros. I also have a very up to date KDE desktop, firefox, all the bells and whistles in fact. There is probably less support for hardware, but you have to go a wee way to find that hardware. I plug things into the USB port and the PCMCIA port and they just seem to work. The built in atheros wireless works out of the BSD kernel - the linux drivers only made it to the kernel a short while ago. There is also a linux emulation system, which I don't know much about, but any software you run on linux may be able to run on BSD anyway. You do have to be concerned about the difference between the gnu tools found on linux and some of the tools found on BSD. As a small example ls /etc/* -l works on linux, but the BSD ls insists that the -l switch comes before the parameter. I am not sure why Rik said he would prefer to teach BSD than linux, given his bent towards GNU and the GPL. I certainly agree with your comments about not creating divides in the *nix world, which only allows the monopolists room to grow at our expense..
