SPAM: Score 3.7: Re: SPAM: Score 3.3: Re: Instead of freebsd. com, why not...

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Monday 14 February 2005 05:45 pm, Anthony Atkielski 
<atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Johnson David writes:

> > This list is FreeBSD *advocacy*. There is no advocacy in telling
> > people to use Windows or Mac OSX instead, especially when we're
> > perfectly capable of meeting many people's desktop needs.
>
> This is excellent evidence of the mindset I mentioned above.  Why are
> people advocating FreeBSD on the desktop, but not on servers? 
> FreeBSD shines on servers.  It is not a substitute for Windows on the
> desktop.

I never completely switched my desktop from Windows to *nix until I 
started using FreeBSD.

I don't expect most people to do this, however. I work on Windows 
machines for clients, and if people ask me what I run I'll tell them, 
but I don't advise they use it unless they're really curious. Even 
then, I tell them that if they don't have any experience with *nix 
they'd probably be happier with something else, like Mandrake. I do 
know former non-technical Windows users who are using KDE on *nix 
systems who are perfectly happy with it, and who find it easier to deal 
with than Windows. It depends on what you want to do. For people who 
are sick of spyware and viruses, but who are terrified of technical 
stuff, I usually recommend they get a Mac.

> By constantly talking about FreeBSD on the desktop, you denigrate
> FreeBSD on servers, even though servers are what FreeBSD does best. 
> And when potential users hear you talking about desktops all the
> time, they get the impression that they need not bother with FreeBSD
> their servers, because it's just another wannabe Windows, like Linux.

OK, but I use FreeBSD on my desktop. Why? Because it does everything *I* 
need, and I prefer running it to any other OS on my machine at home. I 
have a separate drive for Windows, which only gets booted for games. 
That's one thing I don't really expect open source to do well, as 
modern games take a lot of money and years to make, requiring a focused 
team devoting all their time to it - this is where commercial 
development is ideal. I also have a separate partition for Slackware, 
which gets booted occasionally, but not so much for work.

OTOH, I haven't heard a lot of advocacy for FreeBSD on the desktop. Most 
of the benchmarking and improvements are dealing with issues that 
benefit FreeBSD as a server. That's fine with me, as it does what I 
want already on the desktop (and as a server), but I like seeing 
improvments concentrated on the server side. Xorg/XFree86 and window 
managers will still be in ports.

- jt