From: Andreas Kahari [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On 31/10/05, Gareth Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I tell people of the joy of puffy everywhere I go, at the > busstop I shout > > "THEY CALLED IT BSD AND OPEN BECAUSE IT'S ALWAYS FREE" > > > > Seriously though, I now recommend OpenBSD to everyone as a > firewall/server > > system for those migrating from that redmond thing. As a > desktop OS, it's > > unfortunately a bit difficult to setup with everything > needed by the average > > desktop user who doesn't care what their OS is. This makes > me wonder - a > > desktop OpenBSD fork, similar to pc-bsd but based on > FreeBSD might be a good > > idea. > > I've used OpenBSD on my desktop machines at work and at home for five > years now, and there's nothing that I need to do that I can not do. I > use OpenBSD because it's the BSD which I have found easiest to set up > and use. I'm not the average computer usert though, but possibly > quite close to being the average OpenBSD user. My firewall at home > runs FreeBSD (m0n0wall on soekris) ;-) > > Fork however much you want, but I think it would not be constructive.
I agree. I've looked at the "desktop-oriented" FreeBSD forks. I find so little of value in them and the reality is that the kludges that go in place to try to "friendly" up the OS do very little to facilitate making it friendlier it to any degree. For example, a graphical package installer. I find it much easier to open a shell and type "pkg_add" than to find a supported installer package for my OS (out of the hundreds that are available, when compared to the 1000s that are available in ports?) and double-click it in a window manager that I dislike. Or how about the limited capability, featureless installer? GUI != more user friendly. In making it easier to use, you end up providing so many badly assumed defaults that you end up limiting the usefulness, IMHO. OpenBSD is good at what it does. Want to help out in making it a better desktop OS? - Harp at the big desktop app developers to stop taking it for granted that Linux is the only OS out there - Put effort into porting more desktop-related apps into ports tree - Provide hardware for testing, test new driver support as it comes into -current - Donations, t-shirt purchases, cd purchases You'll get much better milage out of this than producing some poorly maintained excuse of a fork that can't keep up with mainstream with the only tweaks being usability kludges around X apps. DS
