From owner-freebsd-newbies Fri Jun 26 19:24:52 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id TAA24839 for freebsd-newbies-outgoing; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 19:24:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from mx.serv.net (mx.serv.net [205.153.153.234]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA24833 for ; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 19:24:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from fewtch@serv.net) Received: from serv.net (dialup505.serv.net [207.207.70.70]) by mx.serv.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id TAA04047; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 19:24:56 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.2 [p0] on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 19:24:14 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: fewtch@serv.net From: Tim Gerchmez To: arthur Subject: Re: How important is "the OS?" Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On 26-Jun-98 arthur wrote: > And for God's sake I hope people don't think I'm trying to be overly > serious, I just enjoy learning more about the computer environment I've > decided to use. In fact my first installation of FreeBSD was with a good > friend of mine and a flat of beer, we had gotten the FreeBSD box up, > running and connected to the net within an hour, not bad for the first > time out I feel ;) Hell, a lot better than "not bad"... especially if you were buzzing on beer at the time ... Then again, some people think even BETTER after a few beers... :-) > since then I haven't looked back, FreeBSD is all I > use for my personal systems. It's nice to have an operationg system that > fills my needs and desires. I wish I could say/do the same, but unfortunately for anyone looking to make any money related to computers (unless you become a Unix system administrator), the Windows platforms are where most of the bucks are floating around. I'm currently on disability and looking to get off it eventually, and I supplement my paltry income with shareware checks. Unix shareware is few and far between, and I'll bet registrations are even more rare, being that you could find something similar to just about anything you can do under Unix for free, or write it yourself (many Unix users are also programmers). Also, there is simply more hardware drivers, and more commercial software available for Wintel. So although I wish BSD was enough for me and I could go back to a single boot system, it's not gonna happen in any forseeable time frame. I DO find myself using Win95 a heck of a lot less than I was, though :-)... It's just not as much fun, it bores me... but I *can* access my scanner, my sound card and my SparQ drive under Win95 (and have some cool utilities, including a RAM drive that grows and shrinks dynamically depending on how occupied it is), whereas I can't under BSD. Such is life... I've never run into perfection as far as OS's go, and you DO have to admit that BSD is pretty lacking in hardware driver support, especially for the newer stuff. They say that you should choose your hardware based on which OS you run, and next time around I may do that; but this time I'm not going to junk or sell $500-$600 worth of equipment just so I can switch to BSD exclusively. Besides, a dual boot system isn't a bad notion at all. Pick a preferred OS, use that mostly, and when you need to do something that you can't with it, use another one. Takes more hard drive space, but that comes cheap these days. ---------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: Tim Gerchmez Date: 26-Jun-98 Time: 19:13:50 This message was sent by XFMail under Fvwm2 and FREEBSD. My personal website is at http://www.serv.net/~fewtch/index.html Take a look if you have the time - something for everyone there. ---------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message