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Interview With the PC-BSD Team

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the user-friendly-depends-so-much-on-the-user dept.

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."

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:*BSD is Dying by laffer1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Its only dying in your mind.

    Here are the facts:

    There are currently 4 bsd projects that i'm aware of. They include FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD. In addition to these projects which each develop their own kernel and userland, there are linux style distros PC-BSD and DesktopBSD which do not develop their own kernel or low level userland. (they add gui shit) These two track freebsd progress as well as other projects like frenzy that do live cds.

    I'm also in the process of starting a BSD project based on FreeBSD 6.x which is a fork like dragonfly was. My project is aimed at developing a desktop friendly bsd from the ground up. Another words, I want to make a BSD install with x11, a window manager and basic applications as well as reasonable defaults for desktop users. Its not like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD since I will be modifying the userland and kernel. I also don't plan on using KDE like they do as KDE users are covered by their efforts. BSD on the desktop is important in part because Macs have gone up in price during the intel switch. Plus if I accomplish my goals, apple may benefit from the source anyway. Finally, I plan on leaving as much BSD licensed as possible. The other projects prefer GPL.

    I don't have a website up yet, but the uri will be http://www.midnightbsd.org/ (MidnightBSD)

    --
    MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
  2. dpkg blues by adolfojp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I love PC-BSD's self contained software installer above all. It brings the simplicity and elegance of Windows and Mac software installation to the nix world.

    Package managers like Synaptic don't make too much sense to me. They are great as long as every computer that you manage has a broadband connection. There are many people in the world, especially in developing nations, that can not afford that luxury. I'd much rather keep copies of software on CDs to distribute instead of having to connect every computer to a fat pipe whenever I want to install a software package. Yes, I understand that you can configure removable media as a source, but the process in not intuitive and you have to make sure that every dependency is available on the CD to begin with.

    If PC-BSD were to release a GNOME centric version of its software I would switch all of my machines in a heartbeat.