Another Step Towards BSD on the Desktop 536
linuxbeta writes "DesktopBSD is the latest easy to install BSD aimed squarely at the desktop. Installation screen shots. From their site: 'DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that's easy to use and install.' DesktopBSD joins the ranks of PC-BSD and FreeSBIE."
BSD v Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't a BSD distro going to be about the same as a Linux distro? Does the kernel make that big of a difference?
Note the question marks. I am asking.
Would you like a LiveCD with that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Convince me (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:BSD v Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:BSD v Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
The hardware support generally isn't as good. The software tends to be ported from Linux or just generally cross-platform. Mostly what BSD distros offer are a different methodology, to be finely tuned to one thing(ex. security) rather than, like a Linux distro, just Linux with a roughly adapted kernel.
BSD or KDE? (Score:5, Interesting)
People who are keen enough to be interested in BSD will already know what KDE looks like. It would be far more instructive to show screenshots of things that are unique to this particular distribution of BSD. How about showing the GUI tool for software installation, or samba configuration, or something.
All I know now is that BSD runs KDE
I like the KDE background, though
Re:Too bad, fragmentation of FOSS Desktop efforts (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not the kernel. (Score:4, Interesting)
The BSDs have sane, useful, documented and functional userlands, which makes them a joy to use. There is no reason that linux distros couldn't be made with a nice userland too, but nobody seems to have done it. It seems like most linux users have never used a nice unix system, so they don't realize what they are missing.
Re:BSD v Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
The main difference from my POV, though, is that a lot of open source software is written for Linux first and maybe almost exclusively, using Linux-only features which promptly break on BSD without going to heroic efforts to add portability layers. It's my main pet peeve, *nix software which isn't portable. Who would have thought the OSS crowd would have forgotten that lesson so easily, now that Linux has conquered all. It's not a problem for the major packages, but the little programs that people write almost invariably port poorly.
Just as an example, take MythTV. OK, the TV driver stuff, sure, that's clearly Linux-specific. Fine. But there's this kitchen sink approach which makes it a major undertaking to recompile the frontend on any other platform, even when the codecs themselves are portable. I think the MythTV project could use some more thought into how the different parts can be isolated into reusable components, rather than striving to integrate everything seamlessly first. But the MythTV guys are focusing on making a neat living room appliance, so I suppose it's understandable. And the underlying software architecture seems OK. I'd just like to see, you know, like a separate video server, capture server, and a scheduler server, rather than a single massive backend server.
Re:Necessary? (Score:0, Interesting)
Mike walked away and never looked back. He wrote about the many problems responsible for the terminal postion which FreeBSD now finds itself. Read below, where Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD. It is a real eye-opener, and cuts to the truth (unlike a lot of the fanboy fluff which Slashdot normally publishes):
Re:Funny installation steps (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funny installation steps (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BSD v Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I have never understood this criticism. I have never had a problem installing and using FreeBSD on any hardware I have tried it on. By contrast, I have NEVER gotten sound to work in any Linux distro on any hardware I own.
"The software tends to be ported from Linux or just generally cross-platform."
You must have something confused. I think the porting is in the other direction. However, FreeBSD can run Linux binaries.
Re:BSD v Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, since this article concerns a desktop implementations, I'd be inclined to say no, not much difference. It's probably more relevant to ask about the benefits of KDE vs, Gnome. Your average Joe user will rarely if ever open a command shell, and even if he does, most of the commands are very similar if not identical. Now for specialized applications and servers, there are probably some (marginal) advantages of one over the other, but if, like me, you only use your desktop PC as a desktop PC, KDE still looks and acts like KDE, regardless of what's running under the hood.
On a PC I usually use Linux, because I'm used to it, and on a Mac, I use OS X, which is based on BSD. For my purposes, both are adequate. But does one have any inherent advantage over the other? None that I can tell. YMMV.
Re:This is what they got right... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I'd tend to disagree with you. I think right now GNOME is the better of the two, however I would have agreed with you last year.
Basically as it stands, all the best apps are GTK apps. If you want to run a fully native desktop, you're only gonna do that in GNOME. Whenever I use KDE, I find myself enjoying it as a desktop, but hating it as a toolkit. And I always find myself running GTK apps, like Firefox, GAIM, X-chat, Evolution/Thunderbird, the list goes on.
Now I do like a lot of QT apps. I personally think Konqueror is very nice, even though I hate the defaults. I also *love* k3b and some of the smaller KDE apps like kdf.
That said, neither is perfect. But I think GNOME is improving faster than KDE. KDE is bloated, it has poor defaults, and QT is uglier than GTK (QT has too many borders! too many borders!). And GNOME is too lacking in features. Well, each release of GNOME goes a long way towards solving its features problem. Each release of KDE does little to solve its bloat, poor defaults, and ugly QT.
Given that GNOME is cleaner, better looking, better defaults, is constantly tackling its weak spots, and most good apps are GTK, I can easily see why most distros push GNOME.
But again, it's all personal preference. Both GNOME and KDE are fantastic projects and I wish distros didn't push one or the other but supported them equally. I use Fedora and personally I think Fedora's KDE support is excellent even though it defaults to GNOME.
Anyway, I'll get back to coding in Kate and chatting on GAIM whilst browsing with Firefox in GNOME while burning a dvd with k3b... Unix desktops are not as simple as one DE, one toolkit, one kernel.
Re:Its not the kernel. (Score:5, Interesting)
If the hardware is a year old, you're reasonably certain that it will be supported well in FreeBSD if it's supported in Linux. The caveat is hardware where there is no open-source driver, such as with nVidia and their persistent non-support of FreeBSD on amd64.
External storage devices are a joy to use under FreeBSD. Provided you've kept the da and umass drivers, things as diverse as top-end Minolta cameras and cheap USB memory card readers will happily work. Even cheap USB bluetooth adaptors work, though I'm still wrestling with how to get my Palm to use one to connect to the 'net - not that that's any different to XP, which has managed to stop recognising my Palm entirely and has also stopped recognising the bluetooth dongle.
Short version, if you want to live on the bleeding edge you want to be running Linux. If you're OK with waiting six to 12 months before you get the latest new toy (entirely new technology, not necessarily latest model. eg: NCQ-capable SATA drives), you are almost guaranteed that your FreeBSD box will recognise it, play nice with it, and have good man pages to explain how to use the drivers.
Personal anecdote: My workstation at work uses the Intel ICH5 chipset for SATA. Three different Linux distros (this is 13 months ago) wouldn't install. Couldn't see the hard drive. FreeBSD 5.1 didn't care, which is good because I've long had a soft spot for the demon. Last night I finished converting my home servers to FreeBSD, from debian. Feels good :)
Research it yourself. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't know wether or not something is true, find out. Me saying its true in more words isn't going to change anything, learn to think for yourself. Its not hard to install a BSD and check out how EVERYTHING has an accurate and up to date man page. How man pages not being clear enough is considered a bug and is fixed. How the same group of people are responsable for the entire OS, and ensure consistant and sane behaviour from all userland tools. Compare it to your linux distro of choice, its not hard to see the difference.
Re:Too bad, fragmentation of FOSS Desktop efforts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too bad, fragmentation of FOSS Desktop efforts (Score:3, Interesting)
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other similar operating systems, however, have been designed with a different userbase in mind. Clearly, they excel in that domain. More recently (beginning after your six-years-ago date), desktop environments have either attempted either to court a different userbase (e.g. Gnome) or they have become so good that they are able to be attractive to that different userbase (e.g. KDE). Considering where they came from, and where we've suddenly expected them to go, Free desktops have made outstanding progress.
Aside from that, there will be no 'year of desktop Linux'. It will just be that over time, a relatively large proportion of non-geeks will come to use Free desktops.
Re:BSD v Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
In all seriousness. Gentoo can never acheive the quality of a BSD system. Why? Because ultimately, Gentoo will always be a bunch of GNU packages plus extras hacked together with band-aids.
BSD is the real deal. They have a whole userland tree that gets worked on specifically for it. They don't have to rely on the behavior of some twenty thousand hackish "configure scripts", because guess what? They control the rules of the game.
While a Linux distributor would spend all day tracking patches from upstream sources, with BSD, the distributor is upstream. More often than not, that leads to better quality and integration.
Re:Its not the kernel. (Score:1, Interesting)
OpenBSD supports suspend and suspend to disk on my laptop. I can't say that about Linux.
One thing BSD is also good at is supporting new hardware while still staying true to the Unix philosophy. Where Linux would invent some crazy new proc interface or syscall or whatever, BSD handles drivers rather gracefully IMO.
Re:Too bad, fragmentation of FOSS Desktop efforts (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is how to integrate them to the underlying OS! Until recently there was no standart way to do it, every distro implemented its own hardware discovery scheme.
Now we got udev, pmount, hal and others to help. Have you tried a modern desktop targeted distro recently, like Ubuntu for example? Get a usb drive, plug it and bang! It appears on the desktop MacOSX style.
The only BIG problem left is easy, next-next-finish style, standart installation packages across every distro. But hopefully they'll handle this one too.
Re:Too bad, fragmentation of FOSS Desktop efforts (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft can field a team anywhere for any field. But it most likely won't be a winning team of super stars.
Linux, BSD, and OSX have specific uses (Linux and BSD more so than OSX) and they shine at them. In my mind that's the difference. I don't want a whole team, I just want a really good Linebacker.
Re:Its not the kernel. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I really hope they give free in pertuity. (Score:2, Interesting)
I care about two main things...
First, the existence of organizations like the BSA indicates a deep and troubling flaw in the legal system. When you have to encourage people to rat on eachother in order to enforce laws you have a system of laws that are broken and wrong.
The deep and troubling flaw is the extension of copyright beyond commercial reproduction. Commercial reproduction is easy to find and deal with. Controlling it represents no big loss. Controlling copying at a personal level is inherently invasive.
The second issue is this...
If you ever look at the Windows platform, the home of proprietary software, the vast majority of programs on it do many things the users of those programs are not aware of, and are things that are not in those user's best interests. Basically, when you run a piece of proprietary software, you are giving control of your computer to someone else. It's no longer your computer.
If OS X were GPL, I would most likely buy copies of OS X. I do not care if it is free of charge. But I do care that I know what it's doing when it runs, and that it's actions are independently verifiable and auditable. This is likely going to be a real problem when Apple adopts hardware-level DRM.
Also, the GPL is a simple license. It states its intentions at the beginning in simple language, and the legalese is there to support those intentions in a clear and precise manner. It's the most pleasant to read legal document I've ever read.
Re:Its not the kernel. (Score:3, Interesting)
My conclusion is that texinfo never grew up, and that the niche it tried to fill has been taken by docbook.
Docbook has one significant technological advantage over texinfo: The omission of a standard command line interface to replace man(1). If you're going to use docbook to maintain documentation that's to be available from the command line - it comes as man pages.
Eivind.
Re:Too bad, fragmentation of FOSS Desktop efforts (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, this is a big one. I think the best system is the one OS X uses, application folders [blogspot.com].
I like the fact that DesktopBSD has helpful "control panels" and configuration/installation wizards, it's good stuff.
However, PC-BSD has application folders and that's why I'm going with that. I just think it's the most usable system of progam installation and more importantly, the easiest system for getting RID of programs. Getting rid of a program that's installed it's files all over your HD demands the help of a thing called a package manager or "uninstall wizard" which need a perfect log of where all the little files were installed to.
In practice, the perfect installation log system is never perfect. It happens that it's either not recorded correctly or something changed after the installation which causes the uninstall to fail. If you want to be SURE you just install every program into it's own folder and you'll know that you've gotten rid of everything if you see the folder gone. It's conceptually easier to get your head around and it's just more usable in practice (drag the folder to another PC and it's "installed" there).
Hopefully DesktopBSD will see the light, they're doing well in every other departement.
Good luck guys.
Re:Yea, (Score:3, Interesting)
kldload snd_driver
(loads every sound driver on the system)
cat
(read the output to see exactly which sound driver is being used)
echo 'snd__load="YES"' >>
(tell the kernel to load the specific sound module at bootup)
Remember, 95% of all device drivers in FreeBSD are compiled as modules and stored under
Re:Yea, (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Its not the kernel. (Score:1, Interesting)
It just lacks a few things here and there and then I'd find it perfect. I can count them on one hand.