[nycbug-talk] BSD on a desktop

[Charles Sprickman]

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, Louis Bertrand wrote:

> I bought in to the "Linux is better on the desktop" hype a few
> years ago. I'd been running OpenBSD on servers, and on a laptop
> for PHP and Java development. But the challenge was to set up a
> non-tecnical user on something other than Windows.

> The most annoying part was having to go on a scavenger hunt for
> drivers: network card, AC97 sound on MB. The dmesg in Linux doesn't
> give you a clue, so you have to look at the chips, the specs or just
> guess. I kept rebooting the machine with an OpenBSD boot floppy,
> writing down the hardware specs from dmesg and then continuing the
> hunt.

Personally, I think that if you spend any time at all on a Linux noobie
list, you'll find that many things in Linux are just as difficult and in
some cases more difficult than *BSD.  There is a *perception* amongst many
Linux users that it's "easier", but that's more from familiarity than
anything else.  I've been using FBSD as a desktop for years and I find
that between it being a complete OS (no distro searching) and having the
ports/packages system it's all pretty easy.

See, for example /usr/ports/misc/instant-workstation

Charles

> Ciao
>  --Louis  <louis at bertrandtech dot ca>
>
>
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