[LAU] FreeBSD

[Brent Busby]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2015, Ede Wolf wrote:

>> It isn't.  FreeBSD is for Internet servers and people who want a desktop
>> that acts and feels like a classical UNIX workstation of the 90's.
>
> Does xfce or KDE behave differently when running under FreeBSD? Pretty 
> much the same, really, as far as I can tell. Provided, your hardware 
> is supported, of course.

You probably should have mentioned Gnome 3, because to the extent it's 
been possible to package on FreeBSD at all, it's been because the 
developers have had to mold their OS infrastructure around it, as they 
did before years ago for other Linux software back when HAL was all the 
rage in the Linux world.  (The FreeBSD developers made their own HAL 
back then.)  Here we are again, watching them trying to create 
BSD-licensed base-OS daemons that do the same thing as ones Linux has 
created so they can run some user-space software that needs them, and 
there are still issues with Gnome 3 on FreeBSD, despite the efforts.

My only intended point in the passage you quoted was that if you're 
trying to get a vanilla UNIX workstation feel like you might have had on 
Solaris or Tru64 fifteen years ago, but on a modern desktop PC, FreeBSD 
will probably do that better than anything.  It wasn't trying to infer 
that it's worse for a particular desktop, though since you mention it, 
in the case of Gnome 3, actually it *is* worse for a particular desktop.

> And linux is running one or the other internet server as well. At 
> least so the rumours go.

And because I said FreeBSD is good for Internet servers, that means I 
think Linux isn't?  Don't put more into it than what I actually said.

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky