Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Aug 2005 17:36 UTC, submitted by anonymous
It seems that PC-BSD has set a trend. "DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that's easy to use and install." How this new BSD distribution stacks up against PC-BSD remains to be seen.
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Member since:
2005-08-02
1) Agreed, Konvalo's documentation could be better. But I'm sure it's just a matter of user feedback and contacting the developer.
2) Of course, they cannot substitute build systems like pkgsrc or ports. And they cannot compete with the thousands of ready-to-use packages, built from ports.
3) So the coolest feature of PBI is the KDE-only GUI??
Yesterday, I ran gmplayer from Konvalo. That was "/coda/konvalo.org/start gmplayer" from the command line and waiting some time until the program fires up. This would be in contrast 9 (!!) clicks with PBI from Downloading to Finishing Installation. Not to forget the additional typing of the root password. Compared to this click-mania even the standard procedure via "sudo pkg_add -r gmplayer" + "gmplayer" is less cumbersome.
A now imagine what a Konvalo GUI could look like: Go to a webpage (Toolkit independent!), choose the application and ready!!
Okay, PBI automates the addition of menu entries and that's a nice feature.
4) Zero Install and Konvalo do software installation via downloading and caching. No root passwords for installation, every user can "install" or run the already cached programs. Cached programs will work offline, without network connection. Zero Install tools offer GUIs, can create Icons, etc.
I'm using Gimp, gmplayer, mplayer and gv from Konvalo and a few ROX-apps via the "Zero Install Injector", OS is NetBSD 2.02