I like Ubuntu

Garrett Cooper youshi10 at u.washington.edu
Sat Apr 14 18:57:18 UTC 2007


Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 12:17:20PM +0200, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
>   
>> doug at safeport.com writes:
>>     
>>> First my experience with [Free]BSD as a server completely mirrors
>>> Dag-Erling's observation, it [mostly] just works. I started with BSDI
>>> switching to FreeBSD around 3.5. I think it is also true that
>>> depending on your hardware a FreeBSD workstation or laptop can be a
>>> bit of a challenge.
>>>       
>> My issues with FreeBSD as a desktop mostly come from the difficulty of
>> installing software and keeping it up-to-date: 'pkg_add -r' and
>> 'portupgrade -aP' simply can't hold a candle to 'apt-get install' and
>> 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
>>     
>
> What do you find lacking in the FreeBSD approach?  I'm a relatively
> recent transplant from Debian, and my experience is that FreeBSD
> provides better, more predictable, and more customizable results,
> without increasing the difficulty or reducing the convenience at all.
>
> Granted, I haven't really tried the package-based software management
> options for FreeBSD in any depth -- I'm mostly installing from source at
> this point -- but thus far I haven't any reason to expect package-based
> installation to be any less easily managed than source-based installs.
Well, we have some problems sometimes with cyclic dependencies 
(portinstall / portupgrade and friends), and people aren't really happy 
when names of categories / packages get changed (like what's happened 
recently with the revision of some of the port names), because there's a 
bit more work involved 'fixing' everything back to the same state that 
there was before. People also complain that there aren't enough 
offerings in terms of packages, but that's a resources issue from what I 
understand.

Overall though, I do like FreeBSD's ports system better than I do 
debian's apt-get system :). Having to shuffle through all of those menus 
and pages package listings to install stuff was a pain.
-Garrett


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