Different OS's? Marketshare

[Anthony Atkielski]

Laurence Sanford writes:

> I was converted to FreeBSD from Slackware. If you want to go Linux and
> maintain the "freedom of configuration" you have with FreeBSD (ie, just
> edit the text file, which is in a sensable spot) and get ...whatever it
> is you hope to get from linux - don't get me wrong, Linux has a lot to
> offer, I just can't personally think of anything it offers above and 
> beyond FreeBSD - Slackware would be the way to go in my opinion.

I'm mainly debating whether or not some direct experience with Linux
would or would not be professionally useful to me.  Were it not for
that, FreeBSD would be the obvious choice.

As it is, FreeBSD will probably be the desktop I end up running, in part
because I know it better than Linux, in part because I can actually get
it to install and boot (unlike Mandrake, which just left me dead in the
water 30 seconds after booting and showing a pretty startup screen), and
in part because I like to know what I'm installing instead of just
installing a black box.

However, an obstacle is setting up an X environment, which I don't know
much about, and which I don't have unlimited time to fool around with.
Some of the Linux distributions claim to be plug and play (although I
have serious doubts about this).  Also, on my old hardware, I suspect
that hardly anything could be plug and play--there are just too many
weirdnesses on this HP Vectra.

> But
> that's holy war territory now, so I'll leave you with this: I switched
> to FreeBSD from Slackware because of the ports/package system. They make
> software installation so easy a Microsoft user could do it if they pay
> attention.

Does that include X and KDE?  I'm getting wild SCSI errors on FreeBSD
trying to install stuff, and I don't really know what that means, but it
doesn't appear to be corrupting anything, and it seems to be installing
software.

-- 
Anthony