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.'"

Comments

Beginner friendly?

[the_humeister]

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"

It is a very superficial article

[Budenny]

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.

Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[X43B]

"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.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[TheRaven64]

It's difficult to really explain. I used Linux for a few years, but bits of it always bugged me. I never found a Linux system that really felt like all the bits were designed to work together (in an abstract, hand waving, way). I tried using FreeBSD out of curiosity and was very impressed by the system as a whole. The thing that really persuaded me at the time was something quite small; the sound driver did mixing in software if the hardware didn't support it. This meant I could have KDE apps, GNOME apps, and apps that wrote to /dev/dsp all making noises without breaking each other, something that had bugged me about Linux for a while. I believe ALSA has this ability now.

One thing you will notice is that the BSD documentation is a lot better. When I am working on a Linux box, I usually have an SSH session open to a BSD box for checking man pages. OpenBSD tends to be the best in this regard; any code commit must include a documentation update if it changes anything user-visible, and any discrepancy between the code and the documentation is regarded as a bug in the code.

Overall, I think I prefer OpenBSD these days, but it doesn't support DRI yet so I'd recommend FreeBSD for the desktop (or SMP systems, since OpenBSD's SMP support is about where FreeBSD was with the 4.x series).

Basically, you should try it and see if you like it. Give it a while; I've seen Linux users give up on *BSD because 'it doesn't work right' meaning 'it isn't exactly the same as Linux.'

Re:6502

[iangoldby]

The wonderful beginners' feature of the 6502 command set was that it was so limited.

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!

Please

[tomstdenis]

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