[TriLUG] BSD users?

[Tom Eisenmenger]

Good points, Aaron.  Of course, I wasn't expecting the same quality of 
desktop experience with BSD as I get with Apple (although that would be 
nice).  It did occur to me that the two might be very similar at the CLI 
level, however.

Tom

Aaron S. Joyner wrote:

>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
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>