The Old Way Was Better

[Derik Wilson]

Just to interject with my newb wisdom so you get a perspective of someone
who is brand new to freeBSD.

I bought freeBSD off the shelf so that I could get the BIG flashy book that
did absolutely no good.  I installed it, version 4.7 I think.  I started it
up.  oops! xwindows isn't working.  I tried several video configs (geForce 4
wasn't on the list).  I finally got it to work with geforce 3 drivers but
the sound did not work at all and took me 3 days to realize that it wasn't
going to work.  Finally I got SMART and downloaded 5.1.  Burned my CD and
then rebooted.  From the time I rebooted to the time I was listening to my
music CD's while learning about crystal space in high res on the net, I
think it was a total elapsed time of 45 minutes (only because I had to get
all of the CVS updates).

In short, to hell with 4.x LONG LIVE 5.x !!!!!  =)  Take care fellas and
keep us newbs alive!
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michel Talon" <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr>
To: <freebsd-chat at freebsd.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 10:11 AM
Subject: Re: The Old Way Was Better


> > For what it's worth, I and a large number of other people I know would
>  > agree. The 5.x releases so far have been VERY badly received with the
>  > people I've spoken to and it's not done FBSD any favours. I seem to
>  > remember something similar happening when we were all running 3.x >
>  >boxes  and 4.x started getting releases, but nothing quite like this.
>
>
> Anyways i am one for whom FreeBSD 5.1 works quite well, and i cannot say
> the same of the latest 4.* series. On my laptop which runs 4.8 things
> have degraded with respect to what it was around 4.4. After suspend
> sound doesn't work any more, pcmcia cards are not properly reset,
> and i am now seeing ATA DMA errors and downgrading to PIO, a thing
> that never occurred up to 4.7
>
> Why am i ranting about that? i think that the FreeBSD developers work
> full time on the 5.* series, and that it has diverged so much from
> the 4.* series that they commit errors when backporting stuff from
> Current. You have only to look at the recent PAE merging fiasco to
> attest of that. The 5.* series began several years ago, and we cannot
> reasonably ask that the developers remember what is in the 4.* code.
> The net result is that both the 4.* and the 5.* series are presently
> more unstable than stable. In my opinion, the 4.* series should not
> have been maintained so long (except for security fixes), it stresses
> too much the available developer workforce. Choices have been made
> for the 5.* series, good or bad, this is not the point, it is urgent
> to concentrate on that, and only that. Otherwise you can be assured
> that Linux will draw circles around what will remain of FreeBSD.
> Matt Dillon disagreeed with these choices and is developing his own
> version starting from FreeBSD-4. The future will show what were the
> good choices, but at present, concentrating on 4.* is suicide.
>
>
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