PC-BSD 8.0 Release Focuses On Desktop Use

donadony writes "Last Monday PC-BSD 8.0 was released. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD and uses KDE as its default desktop environment. PC-BSD is designed to make BSD much easier for desktop use. The 8.0 release includes support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64 and improvements in the USB subsystem. The PC-BSD team has also developed a friendly package manager system with a simple-to-use GUI tool (see the screenshots tour). For a full list of changes, refer to the changelog."

Comments

PBI files

[abigor]

One of the nicest things about PC-BSD is the whole PBI idea, which are basically like .pkg files on OS X. When installing apps via PBIs, you get all the dependencies in one shot, which means you don't destabilise your whole system when installing from a central repository where app A requires a library version that breaks apps B, C, D.... This is particularly true when you want to use third party repositories.

PBIs are simply downloaded and installed from places like http://www.pbidir.com/, the process is graphical, and they are easily uninstalled without fuss.

Re:Been testing it

[ByOhTek]

Anything complimenting BSD on /. tends to get an initial troll mod I've found. It's amazing how much hate Linux users have for it.

My experience is quite different from the above AC (of course, both are anecdotal, take your grain of salt - and mine are with FreeBSD, not BSD in general). FreeBSD users tend to be pretty laid back, if it isn't working, they recognize it. They may not care, they don't need it, or they may be working on it.

Linux users tend to get up in arms if you don't treat FreeBSD like the second coming of satan for taking away a small amount of their user base and development power, when Linux is obviously the true and correct solution.