Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 19:29:59 -0700 From: John Martinez <rolnif@mac.com> To: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> Cc: "Gregory A. Gilliss" <ggilliss@netpublishing.com> Subject: Re: Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO Message-ID: <D43DAD2E-68A0-11D7-B7DE-0003937C0B34@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <20030407004512.GB16464@gothmog.gr>
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On Sunday, April 6, 2003, at 05:45 PM, Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > > 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). Sure. Works great. Just make X11 configuration a little easier for those who can't or don't want to. BTW, most of those other OSs have text install programs as well. Not that they're good when compared to sysinstall, but they're there. > * 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. CVSup rules. I love it. RPM is too broad and has way too many options. This tells me that they're trying to make it do too much. > * 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: > Ports is the number one reason I continue to use FreeBSD. I'm glad OpenBSD also has ports. I'm also glad that they've started a Ports tree for Darwin/Mac OS X, too. > 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. I agree wholeheartedly. But, it's not perfect. Nothing is. Take those strengths and make "FreeBSD a more worthwhile upgrade path than *any* Linux distro," as the original poster put it. -john
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