[TriLUG] BSD users?

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Tom Eisenmenger wrote:

> Not wanting to start a flamewar or anything, but are there any BSD
> users in Trilug?  I'm thinking of giving DesktopBSD a run, especially
> since the family PC is now a Mac Mini running Tiger (with a BSD
> kernel, I believe).
>
> Tom Eisenmenger

I don't want to discourage you from running BSD on the desktop (I have
done it, briefly), but please note that the fact that OS X has a
BSD-derived kernel should not be an indication that BSD on the desktop
is going to be anything like OS X's desktop experience.  :) Or even that
a reasonable portion of your knowledge gained using OS X will translate
in any way to a classic BSD OS. That's where Apple makes their money,
taking good technology and making it elegant, beautiful, and simple to
use.  I haven't tried DesktopBSD (as recently touted on slashdot), but
having used FreeBSD extensively on servers, and briefly on desktops, my
experience would be that you can make a good desktop out of any
operating system, but with most of the BSDs it's going to require more
legwork, and under-the-hood knowledge than it's probably worth.  All of
your favorite open source tools will run just fine, you can run all of
the full desktop environments (ala gnome, kde, etc), but the entire
process usually lacks the polish you find on a Linux distro (and often
those aren't what would normally be defined as polished :) ).

I'd definitely say give it a try, but try and go in with the right
expectations.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner