Slashdot Mirror
Interview With the PC-BSD Team
GeekyBodhi writes "FOSSEngineer.com has an interview with a couple of guys from the PC-BSD development team after the distro recently released their first stable version 1.0. PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD and aims to dumb down installation and daily usage, enabling a non-technical user to run it as his primary desktop. The guys talk about their pre-release journey, features unique to PC-BSD and why a minimal installation system is a good thing."
...and aims to dumb down installation and daily usage...
Why the hell would I want that? I would like a simplified interface that is easier to use, but no fscking way do I want something that's dumbed down!
p.s. Of course, PC-BSD is not dumbed down. It hasn't been stupidified. The submitter should have read the article and realized that it's 100% hardcore FreeBSD. Unfortunately, the poor choice of adjective will lead many to think that this is just the BSD version of Linspire. Sigh.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If I may be so bold, if you know enough to know the difference between KDE and gnome, you aren't the target user. What matters is that it works, not whether it caters to a particular set of preferences. Even giving a neophyte choices can build up to rejection if there are too many choices that seem redundant or unimportant to them and their needs.
OK... what's the correct procedure to clean up the registry when an errant program makes a mess of it? Especially after you attempt to uninstall. Or... what options are there to make Windows more flexible in a heterogenous environment without using SFU? Or... What is the single most important change you can make to your Windows installation to prevent or reduce the occurrence of spyware on your system (hint: it's not spyware removal tools)? Bonus points if you can do any or all of the above free of charge. Unless someone has the right answers to those questions I don't think they can say they know much about computers. I'm not attacking you BTW. I'm bringing up the questions to point out that there's always more to learn and that there isn't much point in getting into computers unless you're always learning something. With that said, Linux and the BSDs are much better learning tools for PCs than Windows. You learn a lot more about how the system works. And that knowledge is priceless.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I don't think most NIX users get it. I like dumbed down installs and self configuring stuff. That said, I'm a programmer. I like dumbed down installs because I don't like wasting my time configuring everything. At the same time, I don't like installing distros which require me to track down additional software. Why not release a distro which includes a bunch of software and gui configuration tools? I mean, command line utilities are great, but I don't really want to learn them unless it's necessary. I want something that I don't have to learn, or spend much time setting up. I'm sure I might get flamed from the "you should learn how all your software you use works" crowd, but honestly, I don't want to compile, I don't want download libraries, I just want to freakin software to work. I don't want to have to spend time reading man pages, I want to hit buttons. If I decide I want to use the CLI to find tune settings, that's great, but that's not priority to getting some piece of software usable first. Dumbed down shouldn't be minimal learning curve with minimal software. Dumbed down should be minimal learning curve with more software. So far Fedora comes closest to this for me. A lot of common tasks can be done in not very much time with the gui configuration tools.