Assuming We Want FreeBSD to Grow: Who Is It For?

[Jon Drews]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 03:40:21 +0100, Anthony Atkielski
<atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Chris writes:
> 
> > To me? They are users that are:
> >
> > 1. Fed up with the MS upgrades
> > 2. Fed up with paying too much for software (apps and OS)
> > 3. Looking for a viable alternative to the MS empire
> > 4. NOT your average Windows user.
> 
> All the wrong people, generally. FreeBSD is not a solution for people
> who hate Microsoft. It is not a viable alternative to MS desktop
> software by any stretch of the imagination, except for a handful of

 FreeBSD is a viable desktop. Gnumeric is in some ways a much better
Excel than Excel. For word processors there is TextMaker and or
StarOffice. I am well aware of Abiword and Kword, but the latter come
with good commercial fonts. MySQL also provides MySQLCC, a gui
frontend to MySQL. Evolution, Kmail, or Thunderbird will do fine as
MUA's. Arguably Firefox, Epiphany or Konqueror are better than IE.
Those items cover about 90% of desktop use.
 In addition FreeBSD ports comes with a lot of useful software such as
Scilab, Gperiodic, Qcad, TGIF, Mplayer, SANE ....  Your Microsoft Xp
comes with none of that stuff.