Sysinstall is still inadequate after all of these years

[David Collins]

I have just moved to freeBSD from debian (and obviously windows before
that) I also have OS X. I reinstalled OS X for my girlfriend and there
is nothing to be done, it is so easy.... but .... I also don't have a
clue what it does, and have no real reason to find out.

The freeBSD (7.0) install I thought was fairly easy! Admitedly I did
go into it assuming it was the same as debian, and if it didn't look
the same well assume it is the same anyway. The only tricky part is
the disk setup, but without knowing anything about slices and
partitions I closed my eyes and went ahead managing to get it working
(I learned about slices after). I do only have a base system
installed, and I don't like installing from sysinstall. It is very
slow. It didn't take too much effort to find out how the ports system
works, it was just difficult determining which path to choose since
there are a number of ways to update.

I was really surprised when my wireless card worked, linux was a pain!
Even knowing how to set it up it still requires install
wireless-tools, wpa_supplicant and then making it work on boot. None
of this on freeBSD.

I think *BSD and linux is more for the tech savy, and if you make it
too easy people assume everything is done for them and they become
illiterate.

David (one happy new freeBSD user)