Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 09:00:40 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au> To: "David Johnson" <djohnson@acuson.com>, <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: ExBSD Message-ID: <014301c0e249$debd93f0$0300a8c0@oracle> References: <002b01c0db54$e0febaa0$5599ca3f@disappointment> <20010513171444.E26123@welearn.com.au> <00f401c0db7e$ff3ca2a0$fe00a8c0@kat.lan> <20010513122623.I97034@lpt.ens.fr> <20010513033434.A54250@xor.obsecurity.org> <3B001679.3172B050@acuson.com> <3B00E <3B02EBCA.B29A2C4F@acuson.com>
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From my point of view (having done a few hundred FreeBSD installs) there isn't much to pick from between Windows & FreeBSD installation. The difficulty comes trying to configure X / sound / printers / ppp / etc. There are two factors here ... firstly, the original use of unix appears to have been as a research / development tool rather than as a mass market desktop / gameplaying platform. Developers & other assorted geeks will accept horribly user hostile things like vi, lpr, X, ppp, etc, that certainly couldn't be described as "user friendly" to non-experienced users. I'm not suggesting FreeBSD can be (or should be) suitable for everyone ... there are even countless "levels of enlightenment" within the faithful. I'm quite impressed by its performance for webservers etc, but I couldn't imagine using FreeBSD in its current form as a workstation. For those of us wanting relatively basic functionality, X is a useless poxridden waste of space, vi is an exercise in needless complexity, lpr is an extremely messy abortion etc etc. Secondly, the traditional documentation was written by extremely experienced users who had long forgotten to mention the countless minor but critical points essential to someone less knowledgeable. Man pages may have relevance to the former but are utterly useless to the latter. Thankfully things have improved recently, at least the handbook has & various other books / resource sites have appeared to help fill the gap .... however man pages in general are still written in martian / venusian / whatever & following the time honored tradition of emulating "books with blank pages apart from chapter headings". FWIW, my thoughts are that "task based" documentation would help both newbies & "real world" sysadmins. People who are unfamiliar with the terminology / history / ethos / culture / blah blah don't always have the time / inclination / ability to devote days in a search for information needed to get something working "NOW". eg I wrote the Pedantic FreeBSD for people without the knowledge or time to read several books before starting an installation. The typical user here has little need to know more than how to boot, how to shutdown, & how to "adduser / rmuser", so why subject them to reading heaps of stuff that will go way over their head anyway ?? I think this is probably the main reason that "user-freindly" resource sites have proliferated ... they provide a means for users to do the task at hand without needing to become an instant expert. It may be that the present arrangement is the best overall .... the experts have their preferred docs format in the man pages & everyone else has the handbook / user-friendly resource sites. ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Johnson" <djohnson@acuson.com> To: <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 7:06 AM Subject: ExBSD > I'm getting too worked sup, so I'm going to summarize my "I'm leaving" > feelings... > > a) Guilty as charged. I haven't using Windows in over two years. Maybe > the current Windows XP is the target we should aim FreeBSD at. I don't > know since I've never seen it. But I do know that Windows 95, Windows 98 > and Windows NT all sucked. I do not want FreeBSD to suck. > > b) Graphical installs. I done graphical installs for OS/2, Windows 95, > Redhat, Corel, Mandrake, Caldera and SuSE. I have done non-graphical > installs for DOS, DRDOS, GeoWorks, Debian, Slackware and FreeBSD. The > two easiest OS installations I have ever done were Slackware and > FreeBSD. > > You are never going to get a graphical FreeBSD install as easy to use as > the OEM's "recovery disk" until you get the cooperation of the OEM. And > the people building their own boxes will still be screwed (just like > they're already screwed trying to install Windows on their homebuilds). > > If the user is going to be intimidated by a text-based installer, then > maybe, just maybe, FreeBSD is not for them. > > c) Changing FreeBSD. I may have problems with the certain things in the > current implementation of FreeBSD, but I have no problems with the > direction in which I see it going. You will NEVER be able to please > everyone. But feel free to fork off another version. That's what Mac OS > X did. That's what Corel and Storm did with Debian. That's what Mandrake > did with Redhat. > > d) I once was part of a tiny group exploring the possibility of forking > off a Newbie-BSD OS. We spent a lot of time arguing over default > desktops, graphical installers, etc. But the project faded away and died > as we realized that what was really needed was more drivers, better > drivers and better hardware detection. > > I never could get Corel LinuxOS to install on my system. The problem was > that it kept trying to probe my video card. But the XFree86 > documentation says never to probe my video card. I'm sure that Corel > could have qualified as one of my easiest installations. Unfortunately, > it made the wrong decision between ease of use and correctness. I hear > Corel LinuxOS is all but gone now. > > David > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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