Slashdot Mirror
PC-BSD: The Most Beginner Friendly OS
soniyea writes "OSWeekly.com reviews PC-BSD and considers it the most beginner friendly OS in the market. 'From PC-BSD's roadmap to their default installation, I honestly feel good about where these guys are headed with their take on FreeBSD. This operating system has it all: support both from the professional level as well as that of the community, the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer, and of course — speed. Understand for most people, the speed factor is more or less a matter of opinion. But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day? Either way, I totally recommend PC-BSD for anyone wanting to take a step into the wild side. FreeBSD, it's not just for geeks anymore.'"
In terms of what? Exposure to a unix-like system? The only thing they mention that would seem to be remotely beginner friendly is the installation of new software. Some screen shots would help in clarifying this.
Nowadays, does it really matter what type of unix-like system is being run for home use? Once a desktop management environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.) is installed there's really no difference to the casual user. Hell, with that pretty KDE interface, I can't tell the difference between Linux, BSD, Darwin, Solaris, etc until I open a terminal and type "uname -a"
Perhaps BSD's time has finally come? With Lunix Torvald's increasingly tyrannical stance regarding GPLv3, maybe it's time for a switch to a BSD. Real freedom, stability, and no binary blobs sounds pretty damn good.
Yes, true. But if you look at PC BSD, its interesting, and the enthusiasm expressed is probably valid. There seem to be three distributions that are roughly comparable in terms of the end user experience, PCLinux, PCBSD and DesktopBSD. Its not a Windows look and feel experience, but it is Windows-like in the sense of shipping with a controlled set of applications. Not like say Mandriva, where the naive user will often stare in disbelief and wonder why they have abiword, KOffice and Open Office, not to mention half a dozen text editors.
If you're looking for a stable non-MS distribution for people who are basically looking for Office, photo management, Internet, one of these is probably the simplest fastest and most user friendly way to get there.
I don't intend this to be a troll, I'm honestly curious. I've been using Linux since around 1998, and I've always found that it works well for me. I have a friend who swears by FreeBSD, but his zelotry makes it hard to get a strait answer about what's so great about BSD (hmm, now I know how all of my Windows using friends feel when I talk...).
So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux? What are the disadvantages (other than the momentum that Linux has as a desktop OS compared to BSD)?
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
"the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer" I tried FreeBSD once. I actually really liked it but it had one show stopper for me that led me back to FC. I was amazed that theLinux compatibilty layer was able to install Matlab, a closed source program. It worked, however, not all features worked. In my Matlab scripts I tend to make lots calls to the command line of the OS. This did not work and thus many of my scripts were rendered broken. Another strange quirk is the "exit" command did not work. I t was rather amusing that I could run all types of complicated operations and plotting routintes but it would return an error when trying to quit the program. I had to kill it from a shell.
As AJS said, the 6502 was the inspiration for the ARM family, and RISC processors in general. The philosophy is why encumber a CPU with complex instructions that take several CPU cycles to execute, when a decent compiler can get the same work done with an optimised set of small instructions that execute in just one or two CPU cycles?
ARM was in fact an off-shoot from Acorn, the company that made the BBC Micro. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture It continues to amaze me that the first ARM prototype CPU back from the fabrication plant worked perfectly first time!
Thanks for posting. I taught myself 6502 machine code when I was 12 years old. My computer came with a photocopied sheet with the instruction set documented on it, one instruction per line.
The instruction set design made sense, and my first program was 16 bytes long. I can't imagine doing that with a Z80.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
stop [next] posting [next] articles [next] which [next] are [next] nothing [next] but [next] ad [next] impression [next] generators [next].
The dude put like 3 sentences per "page" and doesn't let you skip far into the article [hint, the dropdown says "...continue" so you can't just jump ahead to the conclusions and what not]. I stopped reading it after the 2nd page.
If [next] this [next] is [next] the [next] future [next] of [next] journalism [next] then [next] I [next] fear [next] for [next] our [next] future.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
In terms of raw MIPS ARM is a loser to the "evil CISC" designs like the AMD64 and Conroe. Maybe in terms of MIPS/watt it wins though. I guess different problems. Of course it's hard to say if that's a result of CISC vs RISC or that most CISC processors are much larger.
:-)
Maybe if ARM had 9 pipelines like AMD64 it'd be hella fast too
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The 6502's "zero page" instructions were a timesaver.
That's a feature that designer Chuck Peddle lifted from the 6809 (which he also worked on). The 6809 allows you to relocate this page as well as the stack.
POKE 36879,8
I read somewhere (though I can't remember where) that most CPUs are now RISC designs under the skin. Even CPUs that have complex instruction sets only implement those as a thin layer on top of a fundamentally RISC architecture. Of course this raises the question of just how do you define RISC?
Anyone who knows more about this??
You can expect FreeBSD to support 99% of the hardware that works under Linux. And actually, it will generally be more stable under FreeBSD than under Linux.
The BSDs practically never even SUGGEST recompiling the kernel, even though it's quicker and easier than in Linux land. Everything is always compiled-in, and very much unlike Linux, the system is fully Plug-and-Play. Everything from hard drives to your soundcard and all necesarry setting are detected by the kernel on boot-up (not with something flaky like kudzu, after boot-up) and it will either automatically work, or just isn't supported. Almost never any manual twisting and tweaking of options, let alone hours of it, as Linux users are very accustomed to.
This is a bit over-simplistic, mind you, but basically true.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant