From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Apr 6 17:45:26 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9835A37B401 for ; Sun, 6 Apr 2003 17:45:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from thalia.otenet.gr (thalia.otenet.gr [195.170.0.8]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8F1DD43FA3 for ; Sun, 6 Apr 2003 17:45:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: from gothmog.gr (patr530-b199.otenet.gr [212.205.244.207]) by thalia.otenet.gr (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h370jHxW019919; Mon, 7 Apr 2003 03:45:19 +0300 (EEST) Received: from gothmog.gr (gothmog [127.0.0.1]) by gothmog.gr (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h370jEfx016652; Mon, 7 Apr 2003 03:45:14 +0300 (EEST) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: (from giorgos@localhost) by gothmog.gr (8.12.9/8.12.9/Submit) id h370jC4D016651; Mon, 7 Apr 2003 03:45:12 +0300 (EEST) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 03:45:12 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas To: John Martinez Message-ID: <20030407004512.GB16464@gothmog.gr> References: <000401c2fc75$578b37f0$c601a8c0@plasma> <16586B0C-6872-11D7-B7DE-0003937C0B34@mac.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <16586B0C-6872-11D7-B7DE-0003937C0B34@mac.com> cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO X-BeenThere: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Evangelism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:45:27 -0000 On 2003-04-06 13:55, John Martinez wrote: >On Sunday, April 6, 2003, at 12:47 PM, Peter wrote: >> Never said anything about changing the GUI, but it does need some >> work, its hard for normal users to get with it, but I never want to >> see it become some kind of X11 GUI, I can pretty much go through >> /stand/sysinstall in my sleep, and thats how I want it to stay. > > I tend to agree with this. > > The problem is that you are limited by the same GUI environments as > Linux and every other UNIX operating system. > > Not that KDE is bad (I use it a lot still), but a FreeBSD desktop > would need something to make it "unique" and more appealing to the > normal user. Lots of eye candy. Or else, why would somebody choose > DesktopBSD over one of the many desktop Linux distributions? I'm not sure what you mean by DesktopBSD, but there are a few valid reasons for switching from Linux to FreeBSD today. The most important of these can and do vary a lot from one user to the next, but a few that seem to often spring up in talks that I have with Linux and BSD users are: * Ease of installation. Some of the Linux distributions insist on firing up XFree86 right from the very start, which can be annoying when you just happen to have an unsupported video card or a mouse that fails to work automagically and needs tinkering of XF86Config. The console interface of sysinstall Just Works(TM). * Ease of upgrade. The fact that a base system exists and can be upgraded by running buildworld (well and a couple of other, almost simple, even for newbies, commands) is a big plus. A lot of Linux users that I know are annoyed by the conflicts and inter-dependencies of several packages some times. It's so much easier to grab the entire /usr/src tree with CVSup and build it all in one fell swoop, knowing that the developers have taken care of not breaking things by upgrading only parts of the source. * The ports. I can't even begin to enumerate the virtues of the ports when compared to some of the package management tools that I've seen. One of the most important ones is the fact that you can compile from source using *exactly* the options you want. As an example, I don't want my Emacs editor to have X11 support. I don't use its GUI anyway. Being able to run: # cd /usr/ports/editors/emacs21 # make WITHOUT_X11=yes install is something that I've grown to depend upon over the years. I'm sure there are more reasons why people might consider switching to FreeBSD. I probably forgot a lot of them. Other people will probably have their own, different reasons :-) If all these characteristics of FreeBSD are important to a user, then there isn't really a need for cute little icons of beastie to convince them that giving it all a try is a good idea. - Giorgos