Slashdot Mirror

Avoid useless windows posts here:

http://pcbsd.org/

If you're running Win 7 or 8, you'll probably be OK for driver support.

BSD FTW! Probably PC-BSD as an easy start...

http://web.pcbsd.org/

As for shill above wanking on about "losing your windows skills"...don't worry, if you're a normal human being I'm sure you can learn new things while still retaining your old knowledge, especially if - like many - you regularly work with both.

So - duh - you actually become MORE valuable on the job market!
Being working well for me for over 30 years now...

Try Apple also, based on BSD so under the hood it's not too unfamiliar. Used Macbook Pros (get the right model) are serious tools, and of course you can multi-boot if you can't get your VM to do what you want.

Maybe 2017 can finally be the Year of PC-BSD on the Desktop!

No mention of "TrueBSD" at the PC-BSD website. (Except for the blurb about the sever OS.)

Is this a fork, a re-spin, or just a simple rename?

The problem with Chromebooks isn't so much the hardware as it is the godawful Chrome OS "operating system". It's really fucking crippled in my experience.

Some would say that Linux would be a good alternative OS for a professional Chromebook, but I disagree. We're seeing things to downhill within the Linux camp. systemd has caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. GNOME 3 is terrible. Unity is terrible. Linux on the desktop is a lost cause.

The most viable option is PC-BSD. It's based on FreeBSD, which makes it a very capable and proven UNIX-like OS to begin with. Then it layers on its own Lumina desktop environment, which is based on Qt and is very usable. It also has a fantastic package management system.

A professional Chromebook running PC-BSD looks to be the best hope for competing with OS X or Windows.

He's... not even wrong. It's rather impressive, the number of misconceptions and sheer volume of ignorance he manages to cram into just six short paragraphs.

It was actually quite strange of UNIX that it by default let arbitrary user code stay around unrestricted after logout.

Except that it wasn't by default. You logout, your shell gets the HUP signal. That signal gets propagated down to all of the shell's children, and all of their children, and their children - all the way down to the end of the chain. By default, HUP terminates a given process. If it doesn't terminate a process as described, it's because one of three things has happened. First possibility: the process has deliberately severed its child-parent relationship with the shell, as any program designed to run as a daemon will do. Second possibility: the process has explicitly set a signal handler to trap (or ignore) the HUP signal. Third possibility: the process has been launched with the nohup command (which effectively is the same as the second possibility).

If a program hangs around after logout that isn't supposed to, that's a bug in the program, not in the operating system. The defaults are all set up properly; if a program deliberately sets out to ignore them, presumably that's for a good reason.

It has never been the default that a program will just hang around forever for no good reason.

we should consider it our duty as Fedora developers to improve the Linux platform

Right. That's it. I'm done. I'm out. I've been involved with Linux in some form or another since the days of the a.out to ELF transition - over ten years. I've been grumbling about systemd breaking a whole bunch of conventions for no good reason since I first laid eyes on it. This? This is the straw that broke the camel's back. Any operating system that quietly introduces a breaking change like this - something that is a fundamental part of the design of the Unix operating system, that is a basic assumption that every long-term Unix user is aware of - is not an operating system I want to have to deal with. Sure, it's easy to change the configuration setting for this thing. What about the next change that breaks something fundamental? Or the one after that? Or the one after that?

This isn't good enough. Sure, sometimes change is necessary - the a.out to ELF transition was done for good reasons; swapping out telnet to ssh was done for good reasons - but this kind of subtle breakage is a huge time sink to any halfway serious systems administrator.

Well, at least there are alternatives out there.

PC-BSD

Nothing as far as a distro (or desktop environment) with 3D VR or AI comes to mind but there is innovation in OS going on. Not many have attempted to answer the OP, so here's my list. Others mentioned Qubes, Urbit, and Mirage.io, which reminded me of Nix OS and HaLVM.

Both innovative and seems daily-driver ready:
1. Qubes OS - https://www.qubes-os.org/ - Linux distro that runs a Xen hypervisor to contain every app (including Windows ones) away from the desktop environment
2. Haiku OS - https://www.haiku-os.org/ - Tiny (under 200MB installed), Non-Linux that is binary-compatible with BeOS, nice understated GUI that is bland but usable
3. ReactOS - http://reactos.org/ - Win32 compatible open source OS, very active development scene working toward full NT kernel ABI compatibility. Seems stable enough to be a daily driver but hardware support is lacking
4. PC-BSD & freeBSD 10 - http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.freebsd.org/ - PC-BSD is a desktop distro of freeBSD 10 built for user-friendliness with automatic ZFS snapshoting and a nice graphical package manager, freeBSD 10 has a completely new package manager (pkg-ng replaces the 'pkg' binary)
5. Nix OS - https://nixos.org/ - Linux distro with innovative package manager promising atomic upgrades & rollback.

Innovative server-exclusive (ie no GUI):
5. SmartOS - https://smartos.org/ - Solaris + KVM + Docker w/ full Dtrace support. Claims ZFS as an innovation? Joyent is running a cloud of it
6. CoreOS - https://coreos.com/ - Linux distro exclusively for large Docker deployments. developing a suite of Go tools for datacenter management.

Innovative, but not ready for desktop use:
7. Redox OS - http://www.redox-os.org/ - OS written in Rust (rust-lang), which guarantees a lot of memory-safety, screenshots of desktop in 'News' section
8. Contiki OS - http://www.contiki-os.org/ - Linux distro for IoT embedded devices that claims an innovative network stack
9. Urbit - http://urbit.org/docs/user/int... - *nix distro with exclusively web-based userland, invite-only at the moment, doesn't seem like it will have a UI but that each user is the dev of their own interface
10. Mirage.io - http://mirage.io/ - Develop each app and compile into a single-purpose kernel to be run on some hypervisor
11. HaLVM - https://github.com/GaloisInc/H... - The Haskell Ligthweight Virtual Machine - which runs just the GHC on Xen, another 'build uni-purpose VMs' system

PC BSD

You're full of bullshit, son. PC-BSD is very easy to install, and very easy to use. It's easier than Debian and Ubuntu, in my opinion, and those are among the easiest Linux distros to install and use. And unlike when using Linux, when you use PC-BSD you get a robust, trustworthy, systemd-free installation, plus goodies like ZFS and software released under truly free (that is, non-GPL) licenses.

You're full of bullshit, son. PC-BSD is very easy to install, and very easy to use. It's easier than Debian and Ubuntu, in my opinion, and those are among the easiest Linux distros to install and use. And unlike when using Linux, when you use PC-BSD you get a robust, trustworthy, systemd-free installation, plus goodies like ZFS and software released under truly free (that is, non-GPL) licenses.

Trends like these make me weep for what were my favorite open source projects, Debian and Firefox.

Both of them were on the right side of things for so long. They weren't there to take my information for some corporation to consume for profit. They were there to offer software that just worked, and it worked really well.

Firefox was the first to fall. Starting with Firefox 4, it became a total disaster. The performance remained so poor. The UI was progressively molested until it has become unusable. Now they're adding unwanted "features" like Pocket integration that nobody really wants. Just a few days ago we found out that their built-in PDF reader (which should never have been built-in in the first place) had a serious security flaw that allowed attackers to steal our files! Needless to say, I no longer use Firefox, and now use Vivaldi instead.

Debian fell most recently, with the addition of systemd. Before then, I knew I could count on it. I've used Debian for many years, and it has worked flawlessly for me. Then I decided to upgrade my system to Debian 8. What a mistake! My system no longer booted like it should. It would just hang. I'm just an average Linux user. I'm not an expert. So I was totally lost about how to fix whatever this problem was. I searched the mailing lists, and I saw a lot of emails from a lot of other people experiencing similar problems with systemd. I may not be an expert Linux user, but I saw the writing on the wall. After witnessing the decline of Firefox, I knew that the same thing was happening to Debian. So I did what any sensible person did: I found another distro. Well, I didn't exactly find another Linux distro, because I have moved to PC-BSD instead. It reminds me of what Debian was before Debian 8 and systemd: fast, stable, secure, and trustworthy.

It pains me greatly to see what has happened to them. Both Debian and Firefox were so great to me and so many others, for so very long. They protected our privacy, rather than misusing and abusing us. They treated us like we were kings and queens. But times changed, and so did those projects. Their decline has been swift and painful, and I'm so sad to see them go. As a long time user of both, moving to alternatives was painful, but a very necessary thing. I cannot put myself in the position where I am the victim of severe browser flaws or the victim of an operating system that does not reliably boot.

I just tore apart my home lab and I'm reassembling it, reshuffling some motherboards and hard drives.

Tried tossing my Windows drive on a new motherboard. It just crashed.

I found *one* disk from my PC-BSD desktop. Plugged it into the oldest motherboard I could find and it just worked(tm). Missing half of the zfs mirror on completely different hardware.

Between ports, pkg and their installer program software is easier than elsewhere.

I honestly wished that Windows 10 would be them scrapping everything and going with a *BSD. (Just like OS X). Admit defeat, and start over with a different code base. No one knows or cares how it works, just that it does. Apple has managed to move complete platforms 4 times (68k -> PPC, OS 9 -> OS X, PPC->Intel, Intel->ARM). Microsoft has just released C# as open source. It shouldn't be hard.

Then everyone who knows and wants a command prompt will have a real one instead of a half assed Power Shell (or as it is everywhere else Batch file).

Nvidia releases hardware drivers for it. PS4 is based on it (Meaning AMD has drivers for it).

The first thing you need to insure is that there is a MBR compatibility mode for your motherboard, which for your machine should be IPISB-CU (Carmel2), so this is possible. Once you have that, you can probably figure the rest out in the wiki, or better to ask in the forums. I could give you some help but maybe slashdot is not the place for that. I hang out often in #freebsd so you might catch me there, and in general there are many helpful people there.

You will notice that I put the links for FreeBSD for the PC-BSD. The only real difference between the two is the software repositories. In fact you can easily convert a standard FreeBSD to PC-BSD simply by changing a few configs. You might try that route if you want a quick desktop install. I prefer to 'roll my own' but the PC-BSD guys have really done a lot of good work putting in good defaults.

Aside from pFsense, another great alternative is TrueOS.

The Lumina Desktop Environment (Lumina for short) is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment that focuses specifically on streamlining the ability to get work done while minimizing system overhead. It is specifically designed for PC-BSD® and FreeBSD, but has also been ported to many other BSD and Linux operating systems.

http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Lumina/10.1

I'm looking at PC-BSD as a way to jump-start myself into FreeBSD. The desktop is not too bad, but I'm as yet unsure whether all my tools will run there or not, though.

BTW, I take exception to the attempt to draw a dividing line between desktop and server use. There are lots of us who use Linux on the desktop because we're doing software, Web, or other development, or work that's related to it.

PC-BSD would probably be your best bet for a desktop BSD. It's got the same newbie-friendly vibe that you see with *buntu but is pure FreeBSD under the hood.

We need a free desktop OS. Linux is the only contender.

Is that so?

This is actually a good thing for PC-BSD for a variety of reasons. First, KDE's support for BSD is spotty - try mounting NTFS volumes using Dolphin in PC-BSD. You can't because KDE uses Linux-style mount options instead of BSD's. Also, KDE is (L)GPL, which BSD has been trying to avoid lately (hence Clang, LLVM, etc.).

I'm concerned that iXsystems and the community is biting off a bit more than they can chew - Canonical's having issues getting Unity out the door and, though I don't have either of their financials in front of me, my assumption would be that Canonical is a much bigger company with a much bigger community of developers behind them. However, if PC-BSD is going to get the stability and ease of use that's necessary to be a compelling desktop alternative for all but a few hobby enthusiasts, they're either going to have to maintain a BSD-friendly port of KDE or roll their own desktop manager.

Note you can turn an existing FreeBSD install into PC-BSD too. Basically a case of switching pkgng to their repository, installing a metapackage and running a few bootstrap commands.

Check out PC-BSD sometime. http://www.pcbsd.org/

Good ole Slashdot. 4 weeks behind the times.

http://blog.pcbsd.org/2013/06/jordan-hubbard-leaves-apple-to-become-cto-at-ixsystems/

I have to respectfully disagree. While it takes some getting used to, the FreeBSD ports system is, imo, absolutely awesome. Running into conflicts is extremely rare. I ran into a software conflict two months ago. It was the first time in probably five years. (I've been using FreeBSD as my main home system since 2002.)

Yes, if you install a desktop, X is not automatically a dependency. This situation works rather well for those who want to remotely log into the machine and use a GUI. Until recently FreeBSD supported FreeNX quite well (I've had trouble with the port recently. In my spare time I'm hacking away at it.). If you're remote administering a headless system, having X pulled in as a dependency is not what you want.

I'm sorry you ran into difficulties with X. The thing with X is that you have to remember to use the x11/xorg meta-port. You can install all the X components one at a time through the other ports and I imagine that if you're building a desktop it would be an exercise in extreme frustration.

If you ever decide to try FreeBSD again you might want to try PC-BSD. It's a full FreeBSD system (they just released 9.1 as well) but the installer installs a desktop by default and the PBI system is less arcane then ports can be. (Bear in mind that PBI is built from the FreeBSD ports system and ports remain available to users in PC-BSD.)

Currently using FreeBSD (in the form of PCBSD) on my home workstation. It works quite well with the latest KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, etc... Nvidia card gets perfect 3D acceleration via the FreeBSD driver, audio works great (I much prefer FreeBSD audio to Linux audio).

Also using FreeBSD on my cloud hosted webserver: one main instance of FreeBSD hosted via KVM, running several jails, so I essentially get VMs inside my VM. Performance is great, and I sleep much better at night managing a FreeBSD server than any standard Linux distro.

Gee. Isn't life tough. As I remember from eons ago, Windows is AT LEAST as wrenching. If you're REALLY serious about stability, reliability and freedom from bloat a la systemd, udev, plymouth, la de da, and are willing to invest time up front in return for that continuing stability, allow me to suggest trying out FreeBSD or its desktop friendly derivative, PC-BSD. This would require some real dedication to learn the idiosyncracies. Just to clear one thing up, FreeBSD isn't rocket science to install a DE on. I was doing it a decade ago without much trouble. It doesn't hold your hand and automate everything like PC-BSD does, though.

If you mostly just want a linux desktop that doesn't put you through effing with big changes every year to stay supported, you could do what I did. Install Redhat Enterprise 6 or any of its free derivatives (notably CentOS, Scientific Linux, PUIAS Linux). That way you're good to stay on the same major release, fully supported, hardware-and-feature-back-ported, bug-fixed, and security-updated with good old GNOME 2.32 to at least 2017. I'm a little worried about what RHEL 7's default desktop will look like when it rolls out maybe some time during 2014, but I'm very confident you'll just be able to choose Xfce (as you can now in 6), and anyway there's really no need to make the jump from 6 to 7 until 2017.

If you want to try FreeBSD with ZFS, I recommend that you use the PC-BSD installer. This can set up a complete FreeBSD environment (with or without the extra PC-BSD stuff - I think the 'server' install is vanilla FreeBSD) on a ZFS root. Doing the same with the current version of the FreeBSD installer requires some manual intervention, which is not really fun for people who aren't experienced with FreeBSD. Or for anyone else, for that matter.

Coming from a user of both Linux and both FreeBSD and NetBSD, I can't agree with the absolutes of your post.

BSDs are never easier than Linux. Linux is more modern, while BSDs stick to "tradition" and take pride in keeping things complicated. Just read their manuals/handbooks and you will have a pretty good idea.

An alternate wording: "Linux engages in constant superfluous redesign, while BSDs stick to conventional but consistent, stable interfaces that are well documented". The fact that up-to-date man pages and well-written manuals/guides exist says a lot by itself. Linux's myriad of ever-obsolete HOW-TOs is a poor substitute.

One good example of a painful process in Linux that is easy in (Net)BSD is developing for embedded architectures. I can be typing away on, say, a (PPC) Mac or a (Intel) Linux or a (Sparc) BSD box, and can cross-compile a NetBSD distribution for an ARM single-board-computer with one line: ./build.sh -u -m evbarm release. I could replace 'evbarm' with 'alpha' or 'sparc64' or 'i386' or even 'vax' (!) and I would magically get a system built for these very different architectures, constructed from whatever system I want, all built from the very same code! I didn't have to rely on some vendor to package the cross-compiler or (very painfully) do it myself -- it's just a part of the basic NetBSD system. They got a lot of stuff right!

While I do agree -- "Desktop BSD" is still not where it should be for the traditional BSDs, Linux has a long way to go here too. However, PC-BSD has done a pretty good job of doing the basic grunt work that is otherwise sorely lacking. "PC-BSD is to FreeBSD, what Ubuntu is to Debian".

Your third partition on Linux will be /dev/sda3, but on BSD it will be /dev/ad0s3e (note that it numbers disks from 0 but slices from 1, and there is still the letter "e" for the partition inside the slice - isn't that simple?)

This is a red herring. (1) On my NetBSD system, the first disk is /dev/wd0a. That's not any different than Linux's /dev/sda0. (2) Who cares? Mac OS X shows my root file system as /dev/disk0s2, and you don't see everyone complaining that OS X isn't ready for the desktop! And sometimes the extra information can save your butt. Example: I have an old Sun workstation with 3 SCSI disks that has run Linux, BSD and Solaris at different points in its life. One of the more painful moments I experienced w/ this box was under Linux, when I removed a nonessential disk (mounted as /data) after removing its entry in /etc/fstab and unplugging it. I restarted the system -- and it would no longer boot -- because the /dev entries (/dev/sda, sdb, sdc, etc.) are enumerated in ad-hoc fashion, had reordered themselves, and the root drive was no longer where init thought it should be. In BSD and Solaris, the verbose naming corresponded to their physical locations on the SCSI bus, so you could pull a nonessential disk and it would still 'just work'. That prevented a ton of headaches.

These issues have been solved in Linux with unique UUID's, but now your entry for /dev/sda3 might instead say something like "UUID=1924d0d6-496d-4bbf-8fd1-aaaac6764bc5" in /etc/fstab. Good luck parsing the UUID to mean "3rd partition" unless your fstab file is well-commented! That makes BSD look positively friendly by comparison.

FreeBSD advocates spent a good portion of their time claiming that FreeBSD is faster than Linux. Maybe on servers under very heavy load. In all the tests I have made on a simple desktop, FreeBSD always felt a little bit slow, jerky, worse than Linux with a lightweight window manager such as LXDE (but not worse than Linux with KDE 4, for example).

Yep, I wouldn't argue with you on the Intel Video Card point...they do suck, as do the GPUs. I guess by support I meant that you can install it without having to pass something to the kernel at boot before you can run the installation, or fiddle with it to get it to work. Reference - http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Laptops#Laptops_with_Built-In_Intel_Video_Chip

If you just want a desktop, the path of least resistance is the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD.

I don't use it for that... I use it as a server in my basement. It currently has a 4-disk ZFS setup on it. I run a Windows VM on it for serving my iTunes library, Netatalk for acting as a Time Machine destination, CrashPlan for my PC backup and as remote backup for family and friends, SabNZB for usenet, Apache for sharing my photos. I'm planning on sticking miniDLNA on it, but I don't have any DLNA devices yet.

Most of my prior unix experience was Solaris and Linux (not counting Mac), and I have to say that this was easier for me... perhaps because of the similarity with Mac, but I'm not really sure why. I like ports a lot - if you've ever used apt-get it is kind of similar. Stability has been fantastic. I've only had to reboot it once for performance reasons, and that was because I filled up the little RAM disks I made for the log files. After that the system got kind of flaky so I rebooted it.

http://www.pcbsd.org/ will be announced today hopefully. Looking forward to giving it a spin and hopefully might change my mind about Linux Mint and become my main OS. Didn't have hardware luck with it in the early days.

"Linux platforms were building GNOME and KDE and remarkably simple graphical installers and easy to use automatic patch systems and support for tons of hardware and the list goes on."

Gnome and KDE are independent of linux and are irrelevant since the bsd's use them too.

Freebsd has zfs, dtrace, nfs4, a new installer, support for tons of hardware, patch support, list goes on and on.

What operating system you get just depends on what your requirements are.

Oh and graphical installer and updating:
http://pcbsd.org/

The truth is it's becoming more a taste battle than anything as FreeBSD/PCBSD and Linux are getting on par with each other. Linux has a larger ecosystem and FreeBSD has a stronger software paradigm. In the end it's virtually a wash for most things.

By the way, has linux gotten nfs working yet? And if yes, did it work after the next update?

Oh, apt-get x,y,z == pkg_add x,y,z.

If you want the truth, there is to much religion BSD(programmer/server os), Linux(kill microsoft), and Windows(fuck everybody). Apple religion is just a whole other world of too much not even on the same par with the others(just status symbolism does even come close).

Sorry for the windows wording but I don't like beating around the bush and microsoft lost the privilege of a nice description long ago.

Licenses by code availability (make/keep knowledge available to enhance society -- purpose of copyrights/patents)
BSD -- short sighted
GPL -- long term/permanent
Apple/Microsoft/etc -- closed

Are you really suggesting that the time I spend will "come back in spades?"

Have you seen PC-BSD ?

If only it were possible to have the best of both worlds, a stable "base" and new/recent applications. I think e.g. PBI-9 from PC-BSD may have a chance of doing that, but none of the currently popular package systems offer anything like it. (Yeah, I read the paper, so kill me.)

Personally, I think it would be interesting if the base (kernel, glibc, that kind of thing) were updated every 6-12 months, but applications were rolling release.

Ubuntu is kind of close with PPAs, but it's a bit of a crapshoot if your particular application has a (high-quality) PPA.

PC-BSD does it, without breaking compatibility with the underlying FreeBSD. If you install a pbi package, it contains all the dependencies necessary to that given program and is installed on a separate dir. If you want to use the ports tree or install prebuilt packages, just use the default tools.
In fact, the problem you mention is probably one of the reasons I don't use linux on servers - on multi-purpose machines, I usually use FreeBSD with a bunch of jails, one for each kind of service (eg. database, mail filtering, mail server, www, etc), allowing me to upgrade each jail separalely without modifying other running services, at the cost of somewhat more expensive inter-jail comunication.

Instead of doing what everybody else does, run a linux, why don't you give PC-BSD a try? http://www.pcbsd.org/ It's older, cooler and a direct descendant of the original UNIX.

or to be different, the great http://www.pcbsd.org/

I think you're missing out on PC-BSD, which is a more desktop-oriented FreeBSD. There's also DragonflyBSD which was developed to improve SMP support, again largely for desktop performance.

If you'd run CDE, you'd be in a better place to appreciate GNOME's usability on Solaris. I don't see what this has to do with thin clients either.

Gtk support on OS X has traditionally been kind of iffy. I haven't had luck running Haskell + Gtk on OS X. I am not aware of any apps that use it. It doesn't help that Qt supports OS X natively.

Ultimately, I think the question is whether or not the loss is worth the gain. I don't personally use GNOME but I also don't see the potential gain here as being worth the loss of community. It's not a great idea to abandon any segment of your userbase, because the rest of your userbase will get skittish. Not something you need with a combination of high-profile competition (Unity) and consistently eroding support. I don't think this is likely to go through, but if it does, I'd say you can expect GNOME to be dead within two or three years.

When you want to have everything served for you (not everyone likes to have the computer set up by someone else), you should search for a distribution and service that you expect. Take a look at PCBSD.

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.

Where does Linux fail where BSD succeeds?

For some people it's the licensing (BSD vs GPL). For others it is the coherence of the system (how many places hide an IP address in Red Hat?). For others, it is a question of style (BSD vs AT&T type Unix). For some, its functionality (I always liked the way the BSD _______ command worked). From some, it's the simple Joy of BSD, or the McKusick - take your pick. For some, it could be the approach taken to a particular problem taken by one of the BSDs, such as the continuous OpenBSD code audits. For some it might be a particular platform maintained as part of the main distribution. For some, it may be the continuing BSD innovations. For some it might be the counter-culture aspect BSD in the Linux world. Plenty more reasons that people could have, including: Linux - 5 letters, BSD - 3 letters. Do the math.

You could say that the only truly popular Unix desktop is Apple's Macintosh running OS X.
Mac OS X: What is BSD?

What's The Greatest Software Ever Written?

OpenBSD FreeBSD NetBSD PC BSD

FreeBSD Mall BSD Magazine

To each his own.

Go grab PC-BSD then. It's very simple to setup and probably just as secure if you spend the time to lock it down.

PC-BSD does what you want. Each package installer includes everything that piece of software needs - library versions, etc. The end of DLL hell.

There's a catch; multiple applications using the same libraries have those libraries loaded into memory multiple times. Also, library bugfixes, etc., must be applied across each individual package.

But, it does exist!

ZFS is already available on Linux as a user-space filesystem (http://zfs-fuse.net/) - not fast but quite functional.

FreeBSD 8.1 has the best ZFS implementation outside the Solaris kernel at present - not as recent as the Solaris ZFS but it appears to work pretty well. People who want a really point and click install for evaluation or use at home should try PC-BSD 8.1, which is a repackaged version of FreeBSD with GUI installer and simpler package installation, and is still FreeBSD under the covers - see http://www.pcbsd.org/

However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage, because there are occasions where it refuses to open the storage (zpool) and it has no fsck, by design. I like the design and features, particularly the per-block checksums, media scrubbing and solving the RAID5 write hole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5_disk_failure_rate), and low cost snapshots - but the 'no data loss by design' ignores the inevitable bugs that do occasionally cause data loss.

http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/20/26/

Pretty much everything that isn't included in the base install of the system. Each one is a full delta snapshot, so far as I understand it.

Yes. This is less disk efficient, but FAR more user time efficient, which is kind of the point.

not to point out the obvious, but when you go to the change log link from the summary, you actually wind up going to http://www.unixmen.com/content/view/151/11/ which tells you how to install nagios. here is a link to the pcbsd 8.0 changelog... http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/151/11/

There are derivative desktop distros based on *bsd, like pc-bsd (see here http://www.pcbsd.org/ and here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-BSD). There's also a corporation based around providing enterprise support for pc-bsd, http://www.ixsystems.com/.

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).

Try PC-BSD. It uses a system which makes it very easy to package applications for a download-click-install system, as well as using the standard repositories. And, because it's based on FreeBSD, sound actually works...

And you have personally witnessed this?

I have.

I am not some bitter FreeBSD user hiding out in his mother's basement.

Well, to be fair, PC-BSD rivals Ubuntu in ease-of-use and simplicity for desktop users IMHO.

Of course YMMV, blah blah, yadda yadda...

Strat