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

PC-BSOD?

[nodnarb1978]

I *know* BSD is quite stable, I've used it in production environments in the past.

But...am I the only one that sees "BSD" and reads "BSOD"....every time??

Always nice to see serious efforts to bring *nix to the desktop, though. :)

6502

[Anonymous Coward]

The most beginner friendly assembly language.

The article is a little too quick to praise

[insulanus_hailstorm]

From the article:

This is the single most flawless installation method for software that I have seen for software since, well, Windows to be completely honest.

Fine praise. Fine praise, indeed.

Hardware Support

[rf0]

How well does it support hardware? Will my scanner work out of the box like Ubuntu? A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel. As others have said its not the worlds best article

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.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Neil]

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?

• Unity and coherence of the system: A "Linux" distribution is an integration of many different packages from different groups of developers (the Linux kernel itself, glibc, numerous GNU utilities, and potentially thousands of end user applications - web browsers, mail programs, editors, office suites, etc). The creators of distributions generally do a fine job of this integration but occasionally the fact that it doesn't all fit together perfectly is exposed (particularly if things aren't working properly and one is trying to fault-find, or perhaps upgrade or change particular bits of the system). The FreeBSD developers aren't (primarily) integrators. Most of the bits of the core system have no "upstream", the developers are working directly on a single project source tree for a complete, minimalist Unix-like system. This system a kernel, libc and the various other system libraries, all the command-line utilites you expect from a POSIX system, documentation (a man page for each program and system call), etc. If, for example, you run a /bin/sh script which contains a find command then the entire software stack up and down (sh, find, libc, kernel) comes from a single set of developers with a unified plan and architecture.
• Size of the default install: the core system is relatively small, uncluttered, yet highly functional. The PC-BSD review mentions Linux distributions where the default install contains enormous amounts of sofware (several different office suits and numerous text editors). Conversely "minimal" installs in the Linux distribution world often really are minimal - lacking lots of basic stuff that I'd expect from a Unix system (vi, C compiler, man pages, etc). The FreeBSD default install is in many ways like a "complete install" of a late 80s commercial Unix distribution such as SunOS or Ultrix - the basic Unix toolset (vi, sh, csh, ls, awk, sed, grep, find, mail, man, make, cc, ...) is all there, but without much in the way of optional 3rd party free software. The whole thing, including sources and documentation fits in 500-ish Mbytes. The sysadmin can use the Ports mechanism to easily add any of about 15000 free software packages later, customizing the system applications to taste.
• Advantages of source based distribution: I have always found it strange that Linux culture is strongly free software / open source based, but other than Gentoo users, the vast majority of Linux people never actually use source code: 99% systems seem to be installed entirely from binary RPMs or DEBs or whatever provided by the distribution makers. I use a FreeBSD CD set to do an initial install, then I track the STABLE source branch in the project source repository. Every couple of weeks I resync /usr/src and rebuild the entire core system from source code to make sure that I'm up to date with security fixes, bug fixes, new drivers, etc. I know that the contents of /usr/src match the kernel, the libraries, the daemons and the POSIX utilities that I'm currently running, compiled with the options that I wanted. If I come across something that appears to be buggy behaviour I can load up the relevent part of the source tree in Emacs, run the binary under gdb and actually try to figure out what is going on. If some bit of behaviour niggles me I can try changing the sources and building a custom version (and easily diff the source tree and attempt to contribute back changes to the project if I think my hack is of some interest to others). Such an approach is not for everyone, but any means, but if you do have the hacker mind-set then it can be tremendously empowering.
• Familiarity: my first serious Unix experience was using commercial Unixes derived from 4BSD (SunOS 4, etc). I've admined and us

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