Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 17:08:25 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: maggie_biggs@infoworld.com, FreeBSD Advocacy <freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Your Chasing Linux article dated August 9th Message-ID: <20020819073825.GR43138@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <000601c24751$399e6480$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <000601c24751$399e6480$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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On Monday, 19 August 2002 at 0:22:50 -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > Hi Maggie, > > Thanks for the FreeBSD exposure on: > http://www.infoworld.com/articles/fe/xml/02/08/12/020812fefreebsd.xml > > I would like to comment on some > of your statements a bit, and as I've published a book on FreeBSD I > think I know just a little about it: > >> inability to draw on the wealth of commercial and open-source >> applications available for Linux > > FreeBSD is not a commercial operating system. Linux is a > pseudo-commercial operating system regardless of what it's > proponents may say. As a member of the FreeBSD core team I'd like to clarify that this an expression of personal opinion, not an official statement of the FreeBSD project. What follows is my personal opinion. I think you also miss the point: the statement is misleading at best. FreeBSD *can* draw on the wealth of commercial and open-source applications available for Linux, as is clarified further down in the article with the examples of OpenOffice, KDE, Gnome and others. >> FreeBSD lacks the polish found in leading Linux distributions. > > I think the kind of polish your referring to is something that will > only be found in a commercial operating system simply because a > commercial OS must attract more and more seats to make more and more > money, and "polish" is the glitz that attracts attention so as to > sell the product. I'd be more interested in knowing which areas, apart from the install program, appear less polished. >> The second drawback is the need to manually configure many common >> tasks, such as X Windows setup and basic networking. We did try to >> use the built-in tools to set up these items in the installer, but >> our entries did not seem to take. Thus, we had to manually set up >> many common tasks. > > This is probably due to the fact that Preview 5.0 is beta code. Possibly. Certainly the changes should "take". It would be interesting to hear what exactly happened; possibly it points to a bug in the current version of the installer. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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