BSD Question's.

[Malcolm Kay]

On Sun, 25 Dec 2005 09:27 am, Danial Thom wrote:
>
> Schwab Streetsmart
> Accounting Software (CA)
> Quicken
> Photoshop
> Adobe Acrobat (for creating PDFs)
>
> Those are the ones I use daily. Surely there are
> some half-assed alternatives for some of these,
> but if I have to use something inferior to use
> FreeBSD then thats a point against it.
>

This is all a question of the applications you need.
My game is full custom integrated circuit design and 
suitable CAD software is available, at a price, on 
most unix style systems including Solaris, HP-UX, 
various Linux distributions and FreeBSD. In this 
field it is the Windows half-assed alternatives
that are distinctly inferior.

> Also, what you missed, was that I mentioned that
> you can be relatively sure that any hardware will
> have drivers for windows, while with FreeBSD
> you're never quite sure. Its also nice when you
> get a new printer or scanner to not have a 3 day
> project to get it to work.
>

For sure Windows has drivers such as the WNT 
postscript driver that stuffs up scaling calculations 
for certain target resolutions of the 
photolithography machines so that art work 
generated from PCB layout packages is several percent 
out in size, and is therfore of course useless. It 
took much more than 3 days to track down the problem 
and generate a utility to post process the Microsoft 
postscript output to turn it into something usable.
Eventually we discovered the problem was admitted 
somewhere in the Microsoft Knowledge Base and had been 
known for sometime without any upgrade or work around 
offered. Such simple known problems just do not persist
in FreeBSD. 

> The only point I made was that FreeBSD is focused
> on server functions and that is justified by the
> simple fact that it will never be as useful as
> windows; if for no other reason than there simply
> aren't the resources for FreeBSD to be a good
> server and also a competitive desktop.
>

The Windows resources are really applied over a 
rather narrow range of popular applications. Go 
outside that range and and other systems are more 
than competitive.

Malcolm Kay