To BSD or not BSD, that is the question??

[anomie]

techieMoe,

a) If you set up FreeBSD again on a test box we can talk about this.

b) This is an unfortunate fact of life. Linux is in hyper-development mode (and I mean that in a positive way). You will generally have the newest drivers before they ever make their way to BSD.

c) I'm not a gamer, but I hear you.

I use my desktop for a lot more than cruising the web, by the way. But I understand the reasons why you don't run FreeBSD.

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

i tried freeBSD on my laptop, thought it was ok until i tried to install the drivers for my geforce go. no matter what, it locked up solid. ah well, maybe another time...
(and yes, i did ask in #freebsd but nobody could help )

[onlinebacon]

I used FreeBSD quite lot for a while, and it is a good desktop system, or server, or pretty much anything really. I really like FreeBSD, package manager rocks, as well as it's speed.

Handbook isnt bettered by anything

[zeroth404]

I have no more experience in BSD (any of them) than simply looking at screen shots, which means I'm a complete moron when it comes to BSD. I'm an avid linux user, however, and my decision to not consider switching to BSD is that it would just take forever to learn the system -- I have bad enough brain farts that I constantly type linux commands in DOS shells, and the differential margin between Linux and DOS is absolute, while BSD and Linux are very close. I'm afraid I'd end up blurring the line between the two. Its also quite bad when moving from one distro to another. I started with slackware - pure linux, everything is easy. Moving to Debian was a breeze, but on comes Gentoo now and I feel like I'm on a different planet.

Theres a much larger support base for Linux than BSD. This is undeniable, and because of that I see Linux having a very bright future dominating desktops everywhere (soon people, soon!).

BSD kernel and Linux kernel should merge :-p

LSD?

[jaboua]

BSD kernel and Linux kernel should merge :-p

LSD?

nice one

Myself I like *BSD pretty much. I felt a bit clumsy the first week with *BSD. The first shocker was when i booted the freebsd 5.3 install CD - I almost expected another linux distro, with the linux device names, sysvinit-like bootup etc. Then later I tried changing configuration files and such, many of them quite different from linux. The first one was /etc/fstab, where I found that the "user" option didn't work for devices, then some files I wanted to check wasn't in /proc (in fact, I don't think proc was mounted by default). Most command-line tools worked like in linux but different argument named. "more" was the default pager instead of "less". After a while with FreeBSD you get used to it thought and it's not very hard, the handbook was a definite plus. I later tried netbsd too, but I didn't like it too much; it was release 2.1 iirc. 3.0 is out now, that one might be better. PC-BSD wouldn't boot from the CD on my box so I couldn't try it, that was at release 0.7.

All in all I like FreeBSD.

[onlinebacon]

On my ultrasparc, I would really like to try openbsd, because of the packages, and because you can update with a cd. However, I cant find one, although it is supported, it doesnt seem openbsd let you have a cd, you have to buy one from them.

They say you can have it from a cd, just not the same as theirs without paying

I dont have that money, so does anyone know where to get one ( a cd that is)?



Thanks

bacon

[jaboua]

@ onlinebacon: Google is truly a friend : http://www.pantz.org/os/openbsd/makingaopenbsdcd.shtml

[thedren]

If you ever had any doubts about using BSD, read this article:

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd...bsd4linux1.php

...maybe you'll find Linux is better for you

I recommend running FreeBSD as opposed to OpenBSD. It follows the BSD "secure by default" model, but focuses a bit more on performance and stability than OpenBSD does.

Yahoo!, NTT/Verio, and Telus all run FreeBSD. Many people deploy FreeBSD on a large scale because of its high stability.

[junkman4547]

I've been using FreeBSD5.4 for awhile now but I still couldn't get my mouse scroll wheel to work. The Handbook is very comprehensive except on what I needed most. But out of the box prior to any tweaking, FreeBSD compiles a whole lot faster than Gentoo, at least on my PC. I say you should give it a test drive.

[Weedman]

I tried the Frenzy freebsd livecd, and loved it soo much that I am now getting my hands on the iso's for freebsd 6.1.

Too bad the frenzy livecd is still in Beta, and most of the applications don't work, and most of it is in russian.