FreeBSD anti-competitive activities

[Tony Theodore]

On 19 April 2010 02:38, KAYVEN RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Apr 2010, Tony Theodore wrote:
>
>> On 17 April 2010 02:05,  <deeptech71 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=misc/145735
>>> Something sure stinks here...
>>
>> I find most installers these days are overly opinionated, gparted (and
>> sometimes OSX Disk Utility) are the safest bets - or just give away
>> multi-booting and simply run virtual machines.
>
> I'm remembering now Vista being a culprit last time I was messing with
> this.. it kept switching how it is required to do dual boot.  My take right
> now on "the conspiracy" is that all OS developers, FreeBSD and Microsoft
> have increasingly had a sense that there are resources that they need to
> dominate, and that this is some sort of design decision, not really having
> in mind the whole dual boot concept.

I don't think it's a conspiracy, just a realisation that with limited
resources it's impossible to play nicely with the plethora of
partitioning schemes - in a way that's seamless to the majority of
users who simply install a single OS.

It's actually a very sane design decision (if it's that at all). I'd
rather FreeBSD developers spent their time on the OS, not on booting
scenarios.

> All this for me has fallen by the wayside, because I have long since decided
> that each OS warrants its very own dedicated hard drive instead of
> negotiating with these MBR headaches.  Make sure you get a nice static
> grounding bracelet.

I don't have that many drives :). These days with virtual machines and
bootable external drives, it's very rare that I need to multi-boot. I
tend to go for extra RAM and faster drives rather than more drives -
depends on your use case of course.

If I do need to set such things up, dedicated partitioners are much
easier than OS installers.

Tony