Time to kill FreeBSD as a Desktop
Gary Kline
kline at tao.thought.org
Thu Mar 29 23:58:09 UTC 2007
On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 11:46:34PM +0200, Rico Secada wrote:
> Hi All.
>
> I have been using FreeBSD as a desktop system, on serveral computers for about one and a half year now. I truly love FreeBSD! But keeping third party ports/packages updated is just to timeconsuming IMHO.
>
> Building everything from ports is ok, on a quick machine, but even on a quick machine building KDE takes a LOT of time. Waiting until the stable packages are ready takes about 2 - 3 weeks, and until then, a lot of other stuff needs to be updated.
>
> Compared to Debian GNU/Linux's "apt-get update && apt-get dist upgrade" command, OR OpenBSD's "pkg-add -u"
>
> >From OpenBSD's man page for "pkg_add":
>
> -u Update the given pkgname(s), and anything it depends upon. If
> no pkgname is given, pkg_add will update all installed packages.
> This relies on PKG_PATH to figure out the new package names.
>
> I really think it is time for FreeBSD to make it more easy to update binary packages, like on OpenBSD.
Until recent months, I was hyping the Ubuntu distro of Deb/Linux.
*Everything* was push-button. Well, okay, my first upgrade was
a disastrous week or three long series of do-overs. But the
second upgrade (to 6.06) was push-buttons and wait until several
hundred megs came across my 144k ISDL. I was eager to move up to
6.10, but the first several forum posts gave me pause. Nutshell is
that you can [easily] upgrade every "Long-Term Support" version.
But these are 2 or three years apart. And the backports are often
"unofficial" (ya' takes yer risks). I'm still pretty happy with
older Gnome and KDE, older apps. The Berkeley distros have the
leading-edge versions, but at least we (FBSD) don't have an easy
way of upgrading ports. I'll stick with the rock-solid stability
of FreeBSD for my DNS server. I'll test things that will improve
the performance of my slower servers--(tuning)--and be ready to
offer ideas, even SWAGS, on upgrading.
So: real work here; play/AV or mostly Audio or Ubuntu.
gary
>
> Best and kind regards,
> Rico
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--
Gary Kline kline at thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix
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