FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE Installation success

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:58:08 -0500, Ian Gibson <ibgibson at gmail.com> wrote:
> What's the situation re: PC-BSD? I thought they were 'FreeBSD on the 
> desktop', leaving FreeBSD itself to focus on being a great server OS.

FreeBSD per definition is a multi-purpose OS. It can be used on
servers (and often is), on desktops, and also on embedded systems.
Mixed forms (e. g. desktops that provide certain server functiona-
lity) are also possible. There is no limitation as with some
modern Linusi that require X to be getting installed - a problem
for a server without any graphics. :-)



> Isn't the whole point of PC-BSD to remove the need to do what the OP did 
> i.e. spend days or weeks installing and configuring FreeBSD with desktop 
> applications?

The main goal of PC-BSD is to deliver a KDE-centered (!) system with
certain preconfiguration and automatisms, as well as caterin the
"first sight effect" that is often considered more important than
strengths in software when questioning which OS to use (means that
the choice of OS is judged by how it looks like).

Please don't get me wrong: I have several friends using PC-BSD for
some years now, and they love it. For me, as a "KDE hater", it is
a complete no-go. As a German, too, as KDE's internationalisation
and german language quality is inferior to those of Gnome or Xfce.
You can scare off a German user with one english word. :-)

Still, PC-BSD is an excellent system if you have sufficiently new
hardware to run it on. KDE runs very well then. It may be possible
that you need to manually add "illegal codecs" if you want to use
the multimedia features.



> It seems logical to me to keep FreeBSD as a server OS and build a 
> desktop separately on top of this, analogous to what Ubuntu did with 
> Debian (only BSD should of course be far superior!).

It is not logical as FreeBSD is not (just) a server OS per definition,
so it can't be kept being one. :-)

In my opinion, "dividing" FreeBSD would make it less interesting to
many users. Its flexibility and configurability makes it strong where
other operating systems simply don't do the job.

Let me give you a very individual example: I'm using FreeBSD on the
desktop EXCLUSIVELY (!) since version 4.0. My home system is so old
that you wouldn't want to have it for free. Still, I can do more,
and faster!, than most idiots (sorry) with their new rocket-like
PCs full of crapware. FreeBSD does NOT force me to upgrade my system
just because I upgrade the OS.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...