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Date:      Sat, 14 Apr 2007 11:57:44 -0700
From:      Garrett Cooper <youshi10@u.washington.edu>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: I like Ubuntu
Message-ID:  <46212428.1010102@u.washington.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20070414182309.GB302@demeter.hydra>
References:  <2a4057fc0704131021t60249c62k4107ee6cf9f1fb8f@mail.gmail.com>	<86mz1ckqlc.fsf@dwp.des.no>	<20070413183656.E73976@fledge.watson.org>	<86tzvjz2dr.fsf@dwp.des.no> <20070414182309.GB302@demeter.hydra>

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Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 12:17:20PM +0200, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
>   
>> doug@safeport.com writes:
>>     
>>> First my experience with [Free]BSD as a server completely mirrors
>>> Dag-Erling's observation, it [mostly] just works. I started with BSDI
>>> switching to FreeBSD around 3.5. I think it is also true that
>>> depending on your hardware a FreeBSD workstation or laptop can be a
>>> bit of a challenge.
>>>       
>> My issues with FreeBSD as a desktop mostly come from the difficulty of
>> installing software and keeping it up-to-date: 'pkg_add -r' and
>> 'portupgrade -aP' simply can't hold a candle to 'apt-get install' and
>> 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
>>     
>
> What do you find lacking in the FreeBSD approach?  I'm a relatively
> recent transplant from Debian, and my experience is that FreeBSD
> provides better, more predictable, and more customizable results,
> without increasing the difficulty or reducing the convenience at all.
>
> Granted, I haven't really tried the package-based software management
> options for FreeBSD in any depth -- I'm mostly installing from source at
> this point -- but thus far I haven't any reason to expect package-based
> installation to be any less easily managed than source-based installs.
Well, we have some problems sometimes with cyclic dependencies 
(portinstall / portupgrade and friends), and people aren't really happy 
when names of categories / packages get changed (like what's happened 
recently with the revision of some of the port names), because there's a 
bit more work involved 'fixing' everything back to the same state that 
there was before. People also complain that there aren't enough 
offerings in terms of packages, but that's a resources issue from what I 
understand.

Overall though, I do like FreeBSD's ports system better than I do 
debian's apt-get system :). Having to shuffle through all of those menus 
and pages package listings to install stuff was a pain.
-Garrett



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