Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO

[Person, Roderick]

Just an over all response,

I think the biggest problem with the "Is BSD ready for the Desktop?", is the
definition of desktop. It seems to me that term desktop has come to mean
what every M$ wants it to mean.

Myself I use BSD at home as my desktop. I'm at work now, and have no choice
of what I can run. I don't dual boot at all anymore. I can check e-mail. I
can browse the web. I can do word processing. I can watch DVDs, listen to
mp3s and divx movies. I can write programs - since I'm a programmer. There
are file sharing programs for people that do that - and they are all
compatible with the windows versions. I can even play a game if I want.

So what can't I do? I can't do anything proprietary! I can't play a game
that is designed for windows. Just the same as a Mac user can't. I can open
Word XP documents - can't do that on windows 98 either. I can't run Visual
Studio or a VB program( why would I want to - but that's a different story)!
But windows can't kde, gnome or thousands of other programs written for a
*nix OS. But windows is generally regarded as the desktop os. I don't think
anyone would say that Windows is not ready for the desktop because you can't
run KOffice or ready a document saved in a KWord format. But, the same
person will say that you BSD isn't ready because you can't run MS Word or MS
Office. This may just be my perception though.

What brought this to my mind is a commercial I see allot now. Juno internet
service advertises that you can IM anyone using any other service such MSN,
Yahoo and AOL. It states you can't do that with anyone else. Every time I
see that I think to myself - hell I do that on FreeBSD with everybuddy!

Just my $0.02!!


Roderick Person 
Programmer
(412)454-2616
personrp at ccbh.com
http://www.ccbh.com