Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 10:25:51 +0200 From: "Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg" <listsub@401.cx> To: "Gregory A. Gilliss" <ggilliss@netpublishing.com> Cc: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO Message-ID: <3E91360F.1090702@401.cx> References: <20030406172035.GA45332@netpublishing.com>
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This is a reply to this entire thread, not just the original posting. The original question was "does FreeBSD currently meet this users goals?" I would have to say no, it probably does not. But I think the real question is "do we want it to meet this users goal?" Im a big fan of FreeBSD. I use it every day. I have converted half of my coworkers from religions such as Sun, Linux, NT or Novell to FreeBSD. I try to help out on mailinglists and forums whenever I get the time and know the answers. I buy every release on CD eventhough most of them are still shrinkwrapped and never used. Basically, Im just one of the regular die-hard BSD fanatics you all know and love(?) ;). Still, my desktop runs XP. My laptop runs XP. My computer at work runs w2k. They are workstations. I use them to read email, browse the web and play games. I want them to show me pretty colorfull icons and do all the thinking for me. When I go home or go to bed, I turn them off. FreeBSD could probably do this for me, and in fact, a few of them do dualboot to fbsd even if its extremely rare. It would require a lot more time and tweaking to get things setup correctly if I had to run FreeBSD all the time. With Windows I just point and click a few times and things happen. So what if I have to format and reinstall everything everytime the guys in Redmond decide to change the color of the gui, I have absolutely nothing of importance on my workstations. Everything with even the slightest bit of value is safely tucked away on a fileserver somewhere. All my mails are stored on a IMAP server. My documentation is on the intranet website and my source code in the cvs repository. Guess what os all those servers run? It aint windows. FreeBSD is the most stable and reliable os I ever experienced, and I have tested most of them. Sun might give it a good fight, but then again Sun requires the budget of a small country where FreeBSD is one of very few os's that are truely free, both in price and license. The financial department loves FreeBSD's pricetag, the techies loves its ease of maintanance and upgrading, and I sleep well at night knowing my servers will keep running forever without glitches. I love FreeBSD, but not even I would get the idea to run it as a desktop. It's not good at it, and if someone asks for my opinion, I hope it never will be. Even Microsoft have realised that it takes a different os to run a server then a desktop. They have a plethora of different editions, like XP Home Edition and W2K Advanced Server. As long as FreeBSD excels on servers, chances are it will not make a perfect desktop. I say we have enough desktop os's, lets keep FreeBSD kicking ass on the servers. -- R Gregory A. Gilliss wrote: > This was posted on slashdot.org: > > http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0401.tsu.html > > I would recommend that *everyone* read this today (Sunday) and ask your- > selves whether the current FreeBSD distro (4.x or 5.x) meets the goals > set out by this study? We've all seen the excreta of these and many other > frustrations in the list archives. Can the FreeBSD core team address > some of these issues and *market* the results to make FreeBSD a more > worthwhile upgrade path than *any* Linux distro? I patently hope so! > > Pls cc: me as I am not currently subscribed. Thanx. > > G >
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