Anyone tried PC-BSD or DesktopBSD?

By crossbonez
in Linux

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Barney T. Administrators

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Tried PC-BSD... it is easy to install and easy to run. To me, the GUI looked a little washed-out, but that was me....... it ran without any issues at all.

Barney

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markwolfe Veteran

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stupid question: why use BSD insted of Linux if they're both easy to use?

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Well, they use a different kernel (for what it is worth). Linux uses GNU for its OS (commands), and BSD uses their own command implementation (decended from Unix, rather than a non-Unix clone of unix).

But, slap KDE on there, and there really isn't much difference to the end user (at least, to my understanding).

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xxdesmus

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yeah...as far as i understand it the end user won't notice much of a difference (in theory at least) ...it's just BSD is supposed to be well known for it's slightly greater stability which has generally suffered from a lack of broad hardware support (which i hear is changing though, at least for wireless hardware) ...i could be wrong, no? :unsure:

<-- gonna install DesktopBSD on a VM and play a bit ;)

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crossbonez

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No flame war on BSD vs Linux pls. i jus wanna hv my hands-on experience with BSD..

btw, seems *bsd can't let me install (detect) on my linux partition (currently playing with Slackware, dual boot with Windows XP). seems if i really hv to install *bsd, i hv to re-partition my only (working) harddisk

my 40GB harddisk is currently divided into:

- 2 fat32 partitions, one for Windows xp, another one for storing my own stuffs, music, some cached copies of some bsd/linux iso's e.g. kubuntu, slackware, mepis, linspire, xandros etc

- 1 resier3 linux parition for Slackware Linux 10.x (which is scheduled to be removed to install SUSE 10 beta 3 next week, if i dun install *bsd)

- 1 linux swap

Edited by crossbonez
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mitch00

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I havnt tried Desktop-BSD yet, i hear its ok... right now im using PCBSD.. i really like it alot, the .pbi's are really a treat to use, very and i mean VERY easy, works just like a windows.exe... only downside is that there arent very many packages available in that format, in which case I use FreeBSD's ports system which is also very easy to use, and has all the pakcages you could ever need

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ThunderRiver

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I haven't tried PCBSD or DesktopBSD, however, I have been using OpenBSD since day 1. No offense, but on some machines, Linux distro (even SlackWare) fails to boot, and OpenBSD comes to rescue and save my day.

I trust OpenBSD more than I do for Linux. In terms of performance, I actually gain more server performance out of OpenBSD than from Linux. With OpenBSD, I have the user friendliness of installing programs, and no more dependencies horror. Sure you can do that with Gentoo/Debian, but neither of these distros really run too well on older machines now a day.

I have a really old laptop (Pentium 200 Mhz, 32 Mb, Trident grahics, 5 gig HD ), and sadly, no Linux distros would boot or detct the hard drive (except Damm Small Linux). OpenBSD (FreeBSD didn't boot at all), on the other hand, boots up like charm. After minimal installatioin, I was on wireless network downloading packages (Damn Small Linux could not even get wireless card running).. and within a few hours, X Windows running flushbox was in good order..

I am glad that PCBSD and DesktopBSD are making progress in user friendliness; however, if they in fact use their proprietary installation format, I think that's truly a huge step back from Ports system.

Edited by ThunderRiver
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Miuku.

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No offense, but on some machines, Linux distro (even SlackWare) fails to boot, and OpenBSD comes to rescue and save my day.

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No offense, but I haven't seen a single machine yet that BSD worked on and Linux didn't, the problem has for the most part been between the chair and the desk.

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theotherdave

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I tried Desktop BSD and it didn't detect my keyboard :blink:

Another differance between linux and *BSD is the way they organise their file system. The thing that originally attracted me to Desktop BSD was the way it had a seperate folder for each program and it it's dependancies / libraries, having been more used to Windows, that setup seemed more familiar to me.. I'm getting used to the file system now tho..

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MateoGWJ

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I've tried PC-BSD: it's impressive. Easy to install, easy to maintain, and quick. You can use the .pbi to install more apps, or get FreeBSD ports. For BSD, it's a big step forward.

Now, is it really any different from linux? KDE is KDE, so the end user experience is no different. I guess you wouldn't really notice the difference until you start getting into the guts of the OS.

  • 2 weeks later...
Neowinian

debackerl

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No offense, but I haven't seen a single machine yet that BSD worked on and Linux didn't, the problem has for the most part been between the chair and the desk.

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Yeah and I have never seen a machine that ran Linux but not BSD :p Now more seriously I DID see one machine that did not ran Linux, but where FreeBSD worked much better. It was an HP workstation SATA hard-disks, PCI express, pretty recent network card, at that time it was hard (in fact impossible) to find a distro that worked easily with the system. FreeBSD ran perfectly in safe mode.

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vhane

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Yeah and I have never seen a machine that ran Linux but not BSD :p Now more seriously I DID see one machine that did not ran Linux, but where FreeBSD worked much better. It was an HP workstation SATA hard-disks, PCI express, pretty recent network card, at that time it was hard (in fact impossible) to find a distro that worked easily with the system. FreeBSD ran perfectly in safe mode.

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I've also come accross various situations where some hardware would be painlessly available to BSD whereas it required more mucking around with linux. I've also come accross the opposite. Who really cares anyway. They are both great oses to play with.

As for the ePenis, I'm pretty sure that setting up Damn Small Linux would be harder than say FreeBSD, so I'm not sure where the BSD = ePenis Enhancement comes from :p

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todd

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I've also come accross various situations where some hardware would be painlessly available to BSD whereas it required more mucking around with linux. I've also come accross the opposite. Who really cares anyway. They are both great oses to play with.

As for the ePenis, I'm pretty sure that setting up Damn Small Linux would be harder than say FreeBSD, so I'm not sure where the BSD = ePenis Enhancement comes from :p

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Difficulty isn't much of a factor compared to the elitism of the task. The best way to describe it would be considered borderline flamebait, so I won't go there.

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