nnxion

DestkopBSD 1.0 has been released the day before yesterday.

DesktopBSD is a FreeBSD derivative and includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices.
It has been released for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures.

From the DesktopBSD review:
I'd like to try it, but I wish the FreeBSD team would make a GUI of its own instead.

BSD might still beat Linux, if they get the hardware support right. I wonder how it compares to Linux on other issues.
P.S. The site is slow, so you might have to be a bit patient.

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Lich

I'm sure I'll give it a whirl, I wonder how it compares to PC-BSD

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Nebula

Looks good. I'll give it a try.

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Prm753

I was going to give it a try, (yes, I saw a BSD distro that actually looked cool) but saw how big it was and decided against it. :/

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Darkhack

I might consider trying this. I considered FreeBSD for quite a while although I never got around to trying it because I was worried about hardware compatibility. I can't even get some of the major Linux distrobutions to get it right. Believe or not but K/Ubuntu has actually been one of the worst. It couldn't even get video right** and during the install I got an error message simply because it found a FAT32 partition on my drive. I use it to transfer files to/from Linux and also to backup important files incase I need to reinstall windows. I was able to ignore the error and have it install fine but then I realized that K/Ubuntu doesn't even come with gcc or make. I really had a bad expierence and was expecting better from one of the top distrobutions. I am downloading Fedora Core 5 right now. Since Fedora is a very popular distrobution and its a new version, it might work alright with my system. If not then I'll try DesktopBSD.

I've always pondered about BSD development. Although Linux is very fragmented at times its nice to know that the kernel is the one thing that is common between them. With BSD it seems everyone is out writing their own kernel and thus their efforts are being repeated and you have people re-inventing the wheel over and over again.***

BSD people seem to be more intelligent than most Linux users however. I would say that a pretty good sum of people are only using Linux to be anti-Microsoft. BSD people seem more calm and cool with everything that is out there and are less radical about Microsoft than Linux users. They also seem to be more knowledgable about Unix systems as a whole.****

** - I realize video is always very fickle under Linux but I've tried distros that were years old that atleast setup VESA correctly. K/Ubuntu is the only one I've tried thats failed to even do that!

*** - I am not trying to start a flame war. I am very much interested in trying BSD. I am just contributing to the conversation things that I have heard.

**** - I am not making generalizations. I realize this does not hold true for everything. This has simply been my expierence in talking to different users.

Nebula

If you can't install via DVD then I don't recommend it as the CD version is very minimal on the programs side of things. And it's just kinda small and not worth installing as a main system. But for a beginner who wants to use a *nix system like BSD then this is great, but if your experienced then go with FreeBSD.

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Nebula

Update of above post:

It does not come with GAIM, or X-Chat, any mozilla products. If you want to install any of those you run into major dependency errors.

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a thing

I was thinking of trying it until I read the above post. No Firefox, WTF?

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Nebula

Yeah... :////////// The first distro I've ever used without a Mozilla product on it.

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Lich

People aren't really inventing their own kernel for BSD, they're just making customizations and tweaks for what they need. The way a linux distro does things from one to the other is a much greater difference than the kernel config differences in some different BSD distros. There's only a handfull of kernels anyways, and each person has their own thing. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD all have some pretty different goals as oppose to SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc who all have the same goal: becoming your primary desktop OS. Desktop BSD and PC-BSD are all just FreeBSD with some different configs.

As for the people...the same people that love linux love firefox because 1) they are usually anti-MS and 2)they want to be a part of something. with linux, you have complete control over what you want to put into it, and if you don't like it, you make your own distro. However, with FreeBSD, you can't just make a patch and have it go through, there's channels, approvals, etc. For whatever reason people don't think the code should be inspected and approved before they just let the public have at it.

@nebula: If you are trying to isntall firefox, gaim, etc from the ports system as root you shouldn't have any problems, since ports will automatically download all dependencies for you (unless you're downloading something like the JDK which is under Sun's licensing restrictions, in which case you have to fetch the dependencies yourself. But at least it tells you the URL and the filename you'll need and where you need to put it). Go to /usr/ports/www/firefox and just do a make install clean and you'll be good to go.

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