Another glance at PC-BSD

[techieMoe]

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I removed some firewood. Let's try and keep this civil, guys and gals.

[lordnothing]

actually, if you guys want a user-friendly BSD i would recommend desktop bsd.. they are actually trying to remain integrated with the rest of the bsd world, whereas pcbsd's package manager isn't aware of or compatible with fbsd ports at all. and pcbsd devels don't care.

[techieMoe]

actually, if you guys want a user-friendly BSD i would recommend desktop bsd.. they are actually trying to remain integrated with the rest of the bsd world, whereas pcbsd's package manager isn't aware of or compatible with fbsd ports at all. and pcbsd devels don't care.

However you're not forced in any way to actually use PCBSD's package manager, which I think is an important point. You're still free to use the traditional ports system, just as any other BSD. They're just trying something different as well. I for one don't fault them for that. It may work, it may not, but ports access and compatibility are still there.

[jaboua]

I don't remember the exact error, but PC-BSD 0.7 would'nt boot correctly, it came a bit farther then the beastie-menu before it kept rebooting or something like that... Therefore I checked out the real (no horassment) freebsd instead, and it worked nice. It might have been a bad burn, i don't know. freebsd 5.3 and 5.4 did work nice at least... However I don't know how to make the beastie menu support USB-keyboards...

[onlinebacon]

I really like freebsd, worked for me after a little tinkering, I do use a GUI, most of the time, well, when I am not root.

[rleesBSD]

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There are some very good reasons that GUIs were developed for FreeBSD.
One of them was to support vertical market apps (Big chain stores use it for POS and for customer service).

An X setup with a few dedicated applications is easier for store personnel to use than a text application that uses an ugly curses front-end. A very big home improvement store (can I name names?) uses FreeBSD to run "on the floor" customer service applications.

FreeBSD is not limited to being a router, or running apache, bind, and mysql.

- rleesBSD

[NadaWTB]

I stumbled across PCBSD 1.1 after trying several different Linux desktop distros. I am a n00b at both linux and Unix, however I love PCBSD. It installed quickly and detected and installed drivers for all my hardware. I did upgrade my GF 6800 drivers, which was a breeze using the PBI system. I have Quake3 Arena up and running great, also using the PBI system. I am now teaching myself to use the port system for packages that have not been converted to PBI yet. I am(was) a strictly Windows user, but this OS has changed my mind. I have never thought Linux would ever replace Windows, but Unix and FreeBSD and the PCBSD OS is a large step in that direction. If I were Redmond I would start looking over my shoulder, not for Linux, but for Unix.

[onlinebacon]

Personally, PC BSD is not my flavour, they would have been better off giving ports a new front end, than making a whole new package management system, this would allow all of the software to be able to be installed from ports, instead of alienating themselves by using PBI.

However, this may have been part of what they wanted to do, make their site a kind of hub to allow people to find the software in categories like they are used to with www.download.com and places to the same effect.

FreeBSD ports isn't hard to use at all, and I think it would be a nice project to make a really good front end for it, GUI,but then again, what's wrong with CLI? :P

[techieMoe]

Personally, PC BSD is not my flavour, they would have been better off giving ports a new front end, than making a whole new package management system, this would allow all of the software to be able to be installed from ports, instead of alienating themselves by using PBI.

You realize that you can still use Ports in PC BSD, right? It's not a replacement for it, just an alternative. I agree that a front-end to ports would be nicer, but PC BSD is still a very nice quick-and-easy FreeBSD installer.

[southpaw]

I think that the idea behind PC-BSD is a good one... I don't consider myself *BSD guru at all, mainly I've been using Gentoo for the past couple of years and I decided to give FreeBSD a try shortly after their 6.0 release. After a few weeks of messing around with that I figured I would give PC-BSD a spin...
Personally Iliked them both to a certain degree, although with PC-BSD I did not like the fact that your forced to use KDE as I am not a big fan of KDE nor GNOME (I'm a Fluxbox man myself )....FreeBSD obviously gives you a little more control over what type of system you want. But I guess when it comes to a "nOOb friendly" *BSD, PC-BSD is probably the way to go...