From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 26 14:38:37 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org 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 7834616A40F for ; Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:38:37 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tim1timau@yahoo.com) Received: from web50305.mail.yahoo.com (web50305.mail.yahoo.com [206.190.38.59]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0700843D46 for ; Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:38:36 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from tim1timau@yahoo.com) Received: (qmail 86101 invoked by uid 60001); 26 Oct 2006 14:38:36 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=sAk3jQV+oPgKNcRW7pQ6BaP8FbQGagEVTu/kCr6Fmou1mHdaaZ5kPx5kPvvqUcV04yDl0g9j48w8eaDzWN8UDTjZcFOCmEoo2NNPG/tJ5iA3Oq+KiLxHVQkmM5zRphltcMl2KjXCShfMMzBCR4uwY+YoYkY8GSS7XTHvBUxc3f8= ; Message-ID: <20061026143836.86099.qmail@web50305.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [210.0.100.149] by web50305.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:38:35 PDT Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:38:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Tim Clewlow To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: Why FreeBSD is good X-BeenThere: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Evangelism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:38:37 -0000 Hi, I am a fairly novice user, I have only been using FreeBSD for 2 and a bit years. I currently use it as a firewall/gateway for a lan, on which exist servers and desktop systems - all FreeBSD. It is this wide range of capabilities that make FreeBSD so good, ie it will quite happily be a firewall/gateway, a server, or a desktop. Unfortunately, this wide range of capabilities can also be a bit of a frustration. The reason is that in order for FreeBSD to be so versatile, there must also be a large number of possible config options to allow that versatility, and, in order to use these options the person doing admin has to first learn those options, or at least know they exist. The same can be said for both kernel and userland, ie to use an application, the user is most likely going to have to learn a few options for each program they run. If you are not used to this, ie if you come from an operating system that simply picks the bare minimum set of config options on the users behalf, and then hopes for the best, then you may be frustrated at having to learn a few new things. But after a while, you will learn (hopefully) like me, that the existance of all these config options for everything actually means that you can make your computer do a lot more than just the bare minimum. So, while there will be a bit of new learning for most people coming to FreeBSD, once you have done that learning, you will have an extremely versatile and hence powerful operating system available to you. Lastly, if you ever really do get stuck, you can always ask someone on one of these mailing lists for some help. Regards, Tim. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com