[talk] Ask Slashdot: Workaday Software For BSD On the Desktop?

[Pete Wright]

On 11/20/14 16:15, George Rosamond wrote:
> Mark Saad:
>> Check it out,
>>
>> http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/11/20/185246/ask-slashdot-workaday-software-for-bsd-on-the-desktop
>>
>
> Yeah, and Matt S posted that other story recently on a related note.
>
> It's an interesting thing in one way.  It's a route for people to get
> their feet wet, and have "BSD experience" and hopefully move into deeper
> usage.  And maybe increase the pool of BSD people for infrastructure and
> dev jobs out there.
>
> I think the BSDs are mostly fine on laptops (although I've never had
> FBSD resume from sleep on a Thinkpad...), and I am personally not
> comfortable on another "desktop OS."  And it certainly makes dealing
> with BSD servers easier, since the man pages, etc., reflect what's on a
> server.
>
> But I am also concerned about the expectations of a lot of the younger
> Linux crew who don't know there is a shell on their box, then have to
> deal with it in some way, or even ncurses.  It's not 1999 anymore, and
> it seems a lot of distros focused on being shiny eye-candy and made the
> transition to Linux from OSX or Windows feel smooth.
>

my prediction is that in next several years is there are going to be 
three pools of unix users:

1) osx peeps who are using unix w/o really knowing it
2) chromebook/ubuntu people
3) old guard *bsd and non-ubuntu users

what i'm really keeping an eye open for is for someone to finally come 
up with decent laptop hardware that can compete with macbook pro's or 
even google chromebooks.  i've never run a lenovo thinkpad but i've 
heard they are kinda lacking these days.  used an HP for a year and it 
was pretty awful...chromebooks look pretty great, but using android for 
my os is kinda scary.

now that i've said all of this i'm really hoping this email bites me in 
the ass in 5 years and something comes out of no where to surprise me :)

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
twitter => @nomadlogicLA