24-hour Test Drive of PC-BSD

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a concise introduction to PC-BSD, a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users. The review describes the installation process, articulates the advantages of PC-BSD,and reveal some of the challenges that the reviewer faced along the way. From the article: 'In the end, I would suggest this distribution to new users provided they had someone to call in case of a driver malfunction during installation. I would also recommend PC-BSD to seasoned Unix users that have never tried using FreeBSD before and would prefer a shallower learning curve before getting down to business.'"

Do we really need this?

[toofast]

Seems everyone is in the business of making a user-friendly OS. No one has yet understood that we have tons of user-friendly OSes and that the OS is not the problem?

Re:Will somebody please explain...

[laffer1]

Linux hasn't failed, it just takes a long time to gain market share from Microsoft. Open source is at a disadvantage sometimes. Most of us don't have the money to get developers to write the uninteresting code that no one wants to write themselves. I guess the Linux community has that advantage with companies like Redhat, IBM and Novell in the picture.

What I find interesting is the interest in BSD distros. I know some people don't like me using the term distro as applied to BSD, but its the easiest way to explain what it really is. What I don't understand is the duplication of effort. PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are both KDE and FreeBSD based desktop environments. At least my project is original, albeit unpopular.

The fundamental reason many of us think free desktops will prevail is still there. Think of BSD systems as a backup in case Linux fails in the desktop market. Even if we all fail, we may force Microsoft and Apple to innovate to stay ahead of us.

no dependency issues with apps

[anagama]

I tried this out recently after being given a disc at a linux fest. It's pretty nice. The guy giving out the discs explained that when you install applications, the applications come bundled with all of their dependencies included. This makes the apps use a little bit more disc space, but avoids the issue of two apps requiring two incompatible dependencies. That's pretty nice.

The downside, at least a couple months ago, was that the disc is an install disc rather than a live one. I think he said it takes over the whole drive as well, but I won't swear to that and it may have changed since then. Anyway, I had it in parallels for a while and although it wasn't enough to convince me to abandon ubuntu, I will say that installing software was brain dead easy -- not that synaptic is hard, but with synaptic you do need to know the name of what you want. With PC-BSD, you just pick from a menu of shiny icons and descriptions.

Re:Will somebody please explain...

[Goaway]

It doesn't need hope. It's already succeeded, in Mac OS X.

Re:Do we really need this?

[Rakishi]

Maybe you have a different definition of "user friendly." Lets see what my experiences are:

-Gentoo: Only took me a combined (installed it maybe 3 times) 3 days, 7 tries and 2 forum searches (for getting around a bug in the install process) to get running. Worked fine but one I wanted to try wouldn't install period.

-Debian: Worked fine mostly, a lot of manual stuff and the docs downright suck (compared to Gentoo with its forums). That is till I tried getting suspend mode working only to have it keep locking up. Then it fried itself for some yet unknown reason and would no longer start up.

-Ubuntu: I had a lot of hope for this one. That is till it failed to start up after installing because the kernel was not compatible with my system (via epia). Of course this has been known for 6 months, no solutions were given anywhere and no notices were given during the install itself. I do not have time to recompile a kernel so I said F it.

-Windows: Works well unless it doesn't then you just scratch your head. The dock on my laptop causes endless problems, mouse won't get recognized for example. Hibernate keeps locking my laptop up more often than it should. Odd freezing when coming out of hibernate that causes the process to take almost 10 minutes sometimes. Every once in a while something stops working and I need to futz around with restarting/disabling.enabling various crap.

I've also test driven PC-BSD

[joe 155]

I've given this one a go. I'm mainly a linux man myself. I'm no stranger to the command line and often find bash the easiest way to fix problems with linux. This however did not give me any grounding for this BSD. Maybe this is just my fault... I suppose I should have been expecting some troubles. I think the biggest issue I had was with updating software. I wanted to upgrade firefox from the version that came on the DVD I was given (I think that it was 1.5.0.3 or something.

The first thing I thought of was going to the firefox site and see if they had an installer for BSD but couldn't find one. Then I decided to search online to see if there was an easy way to do it. The thing I looked at suggested cd-ing into the directory /.../www/firefox (that might be wrong, but you get the idea) and then type "make install clean". I tired to do that and just got loads of text output which didn't seem to be going anywhere. After about 15 mins I decided to kill that and look around.

I found another site which listed the 9 ways he'd tried to update firefox and how in the end none of them work properly. He got flamed in the comments on his blog with comments calling him an ignorant n00b etc. (which would be an image which would put me off going on the forums... or at least make me nervous). In the end I decided that it'd just be a hell of a lot less of a headache to go back to fedora and do "yum update" to update the whole system - there's even a GUI if thats your thing.

So if you think that I've missed something really obvious about this OS or that I've got it totally wrong, you could be right... it doesn't really matter. It still highlights the fact that it just isn't a "user friendly windows alternative" in the same way that a lot of linuxes are.

Re: I have not installed BSD for a while

[Dolda2000]

Yeah, I too think that FreeBSD is itself quite painless and very nice to work with (I use it on my laptop), but that's speaking as someone who likes Unix in all its Unixy glory. However, is there really a need for PC-BSD? If someone wants a user-friendly POSIX system, there are tons of Linux distros out there.

In my mind, the good thing with BSD is that it hasn't cared about all that, and always tried to stay Unix. If someone wants a user-friendly system, I really don't think they care whether it runs Linux or BSD underneath the shiny GUI. It's not as if they're even going to notice the difference. It seems to me that Linux generally has better support for "consumer-grade" hardware, too. I don't really get why they bother with this.

Then again, I guess it's not my time they're wasting, at least.

Re:Will somebody please explain...

[rainman_bc]

I know some people don't like me using the term distro as applied to BSD, but its the easiest way to explain what it really is.

The big difference is that many perceive that Linux is an OS where it is not. Linux needs userland, and fits well with GNU. AFAIK all BSD's are OS's on their own, and are maintained as an OS in the source tree whereas Linux is just the kernel. Each flavour of BSD is an OS of itself. DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are maintained in parallel to FreeBSD. As compared to DragonflyBSD which is a 4.x fork, or NetBSD or OpenBSD which too are forks.

Just say it with me - Linux is not an OS. Linux/GNU is an OS. Add some a package manager and you have a distribution.

Re:Do we really need this?

[arashi no garou]

Actually it has happened...the user friendly free OS, that is. About a year before they were bought out, Be Inc. released a free version of BeOS R5. I can honestly say that was the easiest-to-learn OS I've ever installed or run, and I've been playing with alternative OSes for about 12 years now. Yes, the version they gave away was meant to run from within a Windows virtual drive, but it was trivial -- even, dare I say it? User-friendly -- to install it to a real partition or even as the only OS on the system.

Unless of course, you meant "free as in freedom" (I took you to mean "free as in beer")? In that case, no, there hasn't yet (in my opinion) been a truly user-friendly-for-the-masses free OS. Ubuntu is close...very, very close. But then, that is coming from someone who considers Slackware to be user-friendly.

Trolling?

[msimm]

I wish I had mod points. Since when is having an opinion (which he was perfect honest about possibly being because of his own misunderstandings) trolling? Because it doesn't suit you? I guess it's easier to write opinions off you dislike then taking them on their merit. But it's cheap and I don't understand how you got modded up. The parent offered an on-topic opinion and even worded it with a little humility. You berate his post and offer very little in terms of discussion. THAT is trolling.

An appropriate post would have simply been informational. Who knows, maybe he would have gone back and tried it? At the very least people would have been able to balance what was his experience with your knowledge. Instead you supply a curt and dismissive remark effectively cutting the conversation.