Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Oct 2007 21:54 UTC, submitted by Flatland_Spider
PC-BSD Two reviews of PC-BSD 1.4. The first one concludes: " If you are a new user, there is everything here for you; equally so if you are an experienced techie you can get into the FreeBSD ports tree and compile to your hearts content. Something for everyone here, no matter their level of knowledge or expertise." The second one: "PC-BSD is an extremely user friendly and secure BSD, based on the rock solid FreeBSD 6.2 stable core, with a easy to use package management system, a friendly installation GUI and great hardware recognition. It is easy enough for average users and interesting enough for advanced users."
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RE: It's ok.
by raynevandunem on Wed 3rd Oct 2007 04:46 UTC in reply to "It's ok. "
raynevandunem
Member since:
2006-11-24

Sure, if its drivers to search for, then the whole one-by-one routine sucks, especially if it is something that should've come with it in the first place. But if its an application that I can do without unless I find a particular need for it at a particular time, then finding the best application on a one-by-one basis is, IMO, the better route, since often the distro's repositories may not have it in store (like, say, http://www.kde-apps.org).

In fact, the "repositories" thing was one of the more annoying issues that I had with Ubuntu (Hoary). Any application that was available in the Ubuntu repositories was all that was available to use. I doubt that it has changed since then.

I seriously find the usual pro-repositories argument (that it ensures security) to be pretty ironic and silly in its assumption of user stupidity. I mean, if you wanted to ensure that the user didn't botch up his system through unknowingly installing a malformed application, then why is it that you sat them in front of an operating system that interacts so closely to the hardware in the first place, and not place the desktop system on a virtualization layer that the user can use without ever even hoping to botch the computer up?

I call that "distribution stupidity" at its finest. They expect Windows- (and Mac-)to Linux users to switch their preformed mentalities to the 30-year-old Unix model, which was designed for networks and servers in mind, not desktop computers.

Again, if you want to keep the user from botching the thing up without making him feel debilitated with a repository of "approved apps", then virtualize the desktop utilites - KDE, klik, the filesystem - through FUSE, and keep the ugly network operating system (GNU/Linux) running underneath, out of sight and out of mind.

Don't let the "st00pid luser" touch the "perfect", "genius" Unix filesystem, gcc, the kernel, none of that, and you won't have any problems or issues.

/end rant

Edited 2007-10-03 04:48

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