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if i came through as resorting to personal attacks, i'm sorry, that was honestly not my intention. sure, there's some sarcasm in there, i'll gladly admit that, but it's just my way of expressing myself. i'm used to conversing in this manner (and sometimes i forget that not all are used to this tone..)

And I apologize for my tendency to speak in generalities and lump people together - no particular "personal attacks" came from you.

No one should be blamed for "not giving a rat's ass about my opinion" - I just write the things that I think deserve to be written.

(The "go back to writing html css javascript..." comment struck a bit of a nerve, but only due to my own insecurities... I haven't done much but scripting since the 90s, while I'd rather be writing more serious software in C, or at least Go/Rust/Nimrod... But the in-browser software stack is a universal standard that I am forced to accept.)

I do appreciate criticism, sarcasm, and passionate self-expression - it's the "shut up, troll" stuff (from other people) that should be avoided.

if it was the incoherency comment, it was a bit hard to follow your line of thought hopping from pointing out the (faultily) large dependency list...

My first post, while not wrong, was poorly researched. It was based on a single piece of anecdotal evidence that atypically turned out not to be representative of how XBMC is packaged on other OS'es. The purpose of that post was not to present a well-rounded review of XBMC, and it was clear that I was talking about that specific observation on FreeBSD. I don't comment on every piece of software that I don't use, but I thought that particular observation was interesting enough to give voice to. From the purist point of view, the criticism of "software bloat" still applies to XBMC as it's packaged for other OS'es, but that is far less noteworthy.

I'm obviously presenting a specific point of view, and one that is admittedly not very popular. I am trying to practice and evolve a software philosophy that values simplicity, modularity, and reuse of common components. I am also biased against software that is not permissively licensed, and am trying to make things work while using as few of those components as possible. Some copyleft components, like mplayer/ffmpeg and Web browser dependencies, cannot yet be avoided, but the amount of unavoidable copyleft code needed for a functional UNIX desktop / workstation is gradually shrinking.

...to spawning mplayer through a web browser (which has much more deps - we have resorted from pulling in webkit for that very reason), which surely embeds more scripting languages and has an even higher complexity than xbmc.

I didn't want to simply badmouth XBMC for being 100MB of "GUItard GNUshit" (parody quotes); I also wanted to presented my alternative vision for how a Media Center app ought to be designed. Or, rather, it was two perspectives that sort of melted together. The first one is that "you don't need it" - one can use decentralized media tools and script them together for any desired effect. The second perspective was access to all your media via Web-based app / apps (which of course can run locally).

That first perspective comes from the minimalist unixbeard perspective, which is a minority, even on Slashdot. I just can't imagine having a keyboard very far away from me at any time. Even when relaxing on the couch and watching video on the big screen, reaching for a laptop on the tray table right in front of me (which I occasionally do anyway if I'm on IRC, etc) takes less time than reaching for a dumbremo

Looks like it's another 2-3 hours of compiling packages and the odd several hours of library/package build error resolution for you!

You can use freebsd-update to do a binary update. Also, recompilation of ports is not usually necessary in between minor upgrades (ie. 8.1 to 8.2). Of course, you may have chosen to build a custom kernel and then you need to build it manually. On my dual core CPU with 4GB RAM it takes about 10-12 minutes to build the kernel and 30-40 minutes for world. To deal with etc scripts you can use etcupdate.

Also, if you don't like this way of doing things and you are a more desktop oriented user, you can look at PC-BSD which comes with its own package system for binary packages, while still offering access to the ports system. And PC-BSD 8.2 (which is obviously based on FreeBSD 8.2) was just released, too.

Well, don't you have something better to do with your life than play games?

Even then, linux is not a panacea for a game free existence. There are plenty of highly addictive games in FOSS operating systems, including Ubuntu. Even FreeBSD has the power to serve... you up games. The more addictive the game is, the higher the likelihood of there being a port for it. To find the most addictive ones, just sort by rating using the PC-BSD game repository - http://www.pbidir.com/bt/category/games/rating/. Wesnoth, Tremulous, Assault Cube. And if you give it a chance, the roguelikes (Angband, Nethack) will happily eat as much time as you can throw at them.

One of the nicest things about PC-BSD is the whole PBI idea, which are basically like .pkg files on OS X. When installing apps via PBIs, you get all the dependencies in one shot, which means you don't destabilise your whole system when installing from a central repository where app A requires a library version that breaks apps B, C, D.... This is particularly true when you want to use third party repositories.

PBIs are simply downloaded and installed from places like http://www.pbidir.com/, the process is graphical, and they are easily uninstalled without fuss.

That is why I use FreeBSD. I just can use the versions of the programs I like. I don't have to upgrade all my programs just to install the latest Firefox, or fix some vulnurability in some library. On top of that I can use portaudit to learn which programs need an update due to security issues.

Maybe you should check PCBSD. Additionally to the FreeBSD way to handle software it can use self-contained binary packages (PBI). They work like most software one Windows, they bring all their dependencies with them. This means some overhead, but hassleless installation, removal and upgrade. For popular software, like the ones you listed, these PBIs are very recent (see pbidir).

I'll admit it's a longshot and might not be mature enough for business desktop use, but I'm voting PC-BSD with it's PBI system.

Sorry for replying to my own comment, but felt it was necessary. I should have including the link. Here you go: http://www.pbidir.com/

I prefer DesktopBSD to PC-BSD as DesktopBSD uses ports, whereas PC-BSD seems rather fond of these PBI things, which seem to emulate the worst Windows has to offer (a solution such as this would have been a bit more bearable if they wanted to get away from the orthodox package management system.) That being said, I do with DesktopBSD would move on to FreeBSD 6 instead of 5.5.

If you want Nvidia driver fast and ready to play games in couple of seconds you have to try out PS-BSD with nvidia pbi installer from http://www.pbidir.com/search.php?str=nvidia.