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I used to play the "what distro are we running this week" game. Most were too big, others too small. Some had great communities, but lacked a killer feature. Et
by may 16y ago
I used to play the "what distro are we running this week" game. Most were too big, others too small. Some had great communities, but lacked a killer feature. Etc. etc.
Then I found FreeBSD. The learning curve was steeper, you had to know more about how things actually worked under the hood (a plus, in my book) and the system was elegantly clunky.
A cohesive whole -- more or less -- instead of endless re-packaging of the same things.
I do a minimum install, then build my system up from the ports system. (Ports is like apt-get, pacman, other package management systems. Compiling from source can be a bitch, but only for big things -- Emacs, X11, Firefox etc. but it allows unparalleled customization, or at least the option for it.) Installing binaries is also an option if you don't want to compile.
It has had every piece of software I've ever needed (minus http://joey.kitenet.net/code/mr/ http://joey.kitenet.net/code/mr/) already in ports.
I even recompiled my first kernel within three days of starting out (thanks to Absolute FreeBSD, by Michael W. Lucas), something that seemed a dark art on GNU/Linux.
I've had no stability problems in the last year or so, and I just upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 smoothly. Everything important on my laptop is supported.
If I want shiny stuff like webcam, usb auto-mounting, all that, I reboot into Ubuntu. Not because FreeBSD can't (I'm mostly assuming), but because this is my dev box and I'm not supposed to be doing anything shiny or distracting on here, hehe.
In short, think of an older truck with a manual transmission -- it's dependable, gets you there and back with minimum of frills and you can tinker rather than a new SUV with bells and whistles. While FreeBSD is more angled towards servers, I love it as a desktop OS -- at least for coding and light web browsing.
And it's a single community, without the balkanization of GNU/Linux.
- timtadh 16y agoreally usb auto-mounting is shiny? that shit should just work.
- may 16y agoWell, I meant in terms of "plug it in and it appears on your desktop". When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one. All I do on this box -- by design -- is code and spend too much time on e-mail/HN/reddit/etc. If I need to work with a digital camera or a flash drive, I just reboot into Ubuntu and do it quickly there. FreeBSD is strictly for work (in theory). I've only mounted stuff under FreeBSD maybe once in the past year or two, so it isn't even on the list for me. So, from my point of view as a software developer who lives in Firefox and Emacs, it's shiny. Others differ. But for me, it's not required, at all.
- nailer 16y ago> When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one. How do you read docs without a web browser?
- kd0amg 16y agoWhy do you need a desktop to have a web browser? ¬_¬
- nailer 16y agoWindow management would be required to align the web browser with the terminal windows. A text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content.
- kd0amg 16y agoA text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content. It does, but after using one for a while, most of it seems superfluous.
- _pra 16y agoHe probably means he's using a simple window manager (twm, fvwm, etc) instead of the fancy everything-managers that include desktop functionality. X alone doesn't provide that -- think back to Windows 3.1 days. You had a background, but not a desktop.
- nailer 16y agoI figured something like that. I generally avoid using the term 'Window Manager' because none of twm, fvwm, blackbox, enlightenment, etc. only provide window management - there's almost always some included app launcher.
- may 16y ago_pra is right. I use a very lightweight tiling window manager called dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/ http://dwm.suckless.org/). I do have a desktop background, though I rarely ever see it. What I meant was I don't have a desktop in the Windows/Mac OS X sense -- a place with icons, documents, mounted drives and the like.
- ciupicri 16y agoIt's things like this that make me the impression that I should do the work and not the computer (the *BSD OS).
- dharmatech 16y ago> And it's a single community, without the balkanization of GNU/Linux. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, BSDI, Darwin, PCBSD... ;-) The Linux kernel isn't (at the moment) balkanized.
- may 16y agoAll right, point taken. Perhaps /less/-balkanized was what I meant.