Ways to promote FreeBSD?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Mehmet Erol Sanliturk
<m.e.sanliturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another point is that server installers are highly educated with respect to
> desktop installers and their numbers are small with respect to desktop
> users .
>
> For them , it is very easy to "harden" FreeBSD after installation if ever
> it is needed , because during installation , it is a simple question to ask
> :
>
> Will  this be used as a Server ?

Judging from the amount of effort it takes to "harden" a system
that already starts a thousand services (typical "desktop Linux"
scenario these days), and the number of times I've seen this
sort of customization cause even more headaches, I'd say this
is a slightly exaggerated statement.

You are right that a "plain user" does not care about why their
CD-ROM is not accessible after installation, but there are two
different ways to approach this:

- Install and enable everything by default, hoping that nothing
  bad happens when an unused service is exploitable.
- Install a minimal system and build from there.

Most Linux distributions pick the first option. _Some_ Linux
distributions pick the second option (e.g. Gentoo).

The default FreeBSD installation uses the second option.
PC-BSD leans towards the first option, and does a really good
job at making a BSD desktop 'accessible' to what is usually
called "the average user".

So it all depends on what you want to do, and there _are_ options
that cover both cases for either Linux or BSD.