PC-BSD on top of FreeBSD - does it matter ?

[Chuck Swiger]

On 3/4/2012 3:27 AM, jb wrote:
> But ..., the charm disappeared when I (intentionally ?) pulled ethernet plug
> and started update manager ... The system went into some twilight zone, making
> the desktop unresponsive, from which I could not recover, even by trying to
> kill offending processes I had no clue about as a first time user. Unusable.

Well, if all you wanted to do was browse the web, and you disable your network 
connection, then yeah, that's unusable for the purpose.  If you couldn't do 
other things local to the system aside from this update manager, that's a 
different issue.

[ ... ]
> A few days ago I read this, from a good, minimum-functional-tests-must-pass,
> some wit but no-nonsense reviewer:
> http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/pc-bsd-9.html
> Well, "Radioactive", "The shortest experience ever!".
>
> Does it matter to FreeBSD ?

That's a very good question.

There are lots of people who are looking for turnkey / "no docs needed" 
systems, with "give me simplified choices" but "handle obvious errors with a 
nice dialog window or fix-it 'wizard'", instead of requiring CLI sysadmin 
experience, reading error logs, and running diagnostic commands to fix things.

The usability testing done by you and this dedoimedo reviewer would seem to be 
best addressed by a wireless-oriented device (maybe with a GNU/Linuxish 
userland providing bash and screen) such as an Android fondleslab.

I suspect that the folks who define usability by such criteria are not using 
FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) at all, or they quickly evaluate it and then move on at 
the first major showstopper they come across.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck