Which FreeBSD is best for my PC?

[Mel]

On Monday 01 December 2008 12:19:50 Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> > We have a few oldies, just installed KDE 3.5 on a:
> > CPU: VIA Nehemiah (997.17-MHz 686-class CPU)
> >  Origin = "CentaurHauls"  Id = 0x698  Stepping = 8
> >
> > That's pretty much as low as I'd go for normal desktop usage. The machine
> > you're describing, still makes for a good router or LAN resolver with low
>
> KDE make them slow. it's fast machine.

It's not about that. I'm not advertizing a certain desktop, I have a personal 
preference, and I don't feel compelled to convert the heathens to my works of 
salvation, nor to lie and say that I installed a blank Xorg so that 
minimalist think I'm cool.

Today's desktop *applications* require a certain ammount of resources and 
since OP already stated to want flash 8 with highbit encryption, you will 
need firefox and bunch of gstreamer-*/gnome stuff or linux emulation and a 
lot of good fortune when going with pluginwrapper. This VIA does quite well 
with devel/skype and fc6 linux emulation, once it started up, tho I haven't 
tried conference calls and takes 20% cpu just idling.
Sure - you can trim down the resources a window manager takes up (which is 
actually easy to do in KDE, as in XFCE), but it's the applications that want 
more memory, more power. Natural evolution of the computer age: give a 
programmer more power, means a user gets more features and a slower comp.
I think FreeBSD 5 to 7 is the only software I've seen that actually got faster 
and not just advertised it ;)
-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.