__/ [ Black Dragon ] on Sunday 14 May 2006 14:26 \__
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> __/ [ Black Dragon ] on Saturday 13 May 2006 19:25 \__
>
>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>>>> FreeBSD vows to compete with desktop Linux
>
>>
http://news.com.com/2100-1011_3-6071598.html?part=rss&tag=6071598&subj=news
>
>>> The FreeBSD base system already has feature parity with Linux. This is
>>> about third party code such as GNOME and KDE.
>
>> Opinion: Feature parity is one thing, but in order to appeal to the public
>> they will have to exceed the expectations or have some better licensing
>> offers. I have thought about trying BSD on one of my boxes before. I know
>> and very well remember that you have one yourself. However, I am not too
>> confident when it comes to hardware support and I would possibly struggle
>> when it comes to software installations (say goodbye to RedHat Package
>> Management).
>
> Despite the opinion of a single developer as cited above, I don't believe
> FreeBSD is ever going to attempt to appeal to the masses. That has never
> been its goal and I don't see why it would suddenly change now. Where
> GNOME and KDE go, I couldn't care less, I don't use them anymore.
>
> And yes, I now have two BSD systems. My server is running FreeBSD which
> I also do email and news from, and my gateway/firewall is running
> OpenBSD.
Interesting. I thought about it in the gym this afternoon. I'd really love to
sidle with the little devil, at least on one machine. Your experience and
recommendation gave some comfort.
> I think one of BSDs' strong points is package management. I used RedHat
> Linux for quite a few years and had my share of disasters with dependencies
> and suchlike. The only thing I ever had trouble with on FreeBSD was
> Java, and to this day getting a JRE installed is hit-n-miss. That's not
> a problem for me today though, I now prefer using MS Windows over X-Window.
> Otherwise my experience working with ports and packages has been totally
> flawless.
>
>> FreeBSD may be fine for servers with rudimentary or limited functionality.
>> One of my sites happily runs on FreeBSD, but it lacks function/usability
>> traits. It has no front end such as cPanel and apart from barebone Apache,
>> all I have is Webalizer. Besides, I like Penguins more than I like devils!
>
> That's too funny coming from you Roy. I often see you promoting Open
> Source Linux equivalents to MS Windows applications and now you're knocking
> BSD because it may not have a few Linux specific applications? There is
> equivalent software to those apps available for BSD, but if you insist
> on those, they'll likely run with Linux emulation and probably better
> than they do natively on Linux systems.
No, no. Out of context and perhaps misinterpreted. Allow my to clarify.
*smile*
The Web host takes all the blame for lack of function. They have some highly
neglected FreeBSD boxes and they bother to install nothing extra. For 5
years! My later remark referred to that server/s, not FreeBSD _in general_.
The last sentence was only aimed at my own amusement. See my remark above.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Hack to learn, don't learn to hack"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE GNU/Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
6:45pm up 17 days 1:42, 11 users, load average: 0.35, 0.20, 0.15
http://iuron.com - help build a non-profit search engine
|
|
