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    Free vs PCBSD?

    Discussion in 'Linux Compatibility and Software' started by Hungry Man, Aug 12, 2011.

  1. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Notebook Virtuoso

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    What do you guys think? I'm gonna move to one of them I am just not sure which.

    Is PCBSD still good?

    I'm going to be dualbooting with Win7.

    Can I run either of them in a VM to test out?
     
    Hungry Man, Aug 12, 2011
    #1
  2. weinter

    weinter /dev/null

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    Feature & Hardware support wise BSD is way behind Linux that is why I left BSD behind on consumer hardware which is fairly advance.
     
    weinter, Aug 12, 2011
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  3. debguy

    debguy rip dmr

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    Has it ever been? Since the move to KDE 4 PC-BSD always seemed so bloated and sluggish that I never liked it. This might change with 9.0 since they finally offer alternatives for KDE.
    But also the PBI's always seemed to be a wrong approach to me. It just seemed so Windows-like to download a random setup.exe that often was not up to date or lacked some feature due to a missing dependency in the statically linked blob.

    Up to 8.x I'd always recommend FreeBSD (and ports) over PC-BSD (and PBI). And I hardly think that will change with 9.0. As a desktop user the only reason to try BSD is to learn something about the system. And FreeBSD does a much better job on that than PC-BSD which tries to spoon-feed you.

    Last time I tried there were no guest additions available for Virtual Box. I think I read that has changed. However, I wouldn't expect it to run as smoothly as Linux. I've also heard that FreeBSD (and therefore also PC-BSD) should run pretty well in VMWare, but I never tried that.
     
    debguy, Aug 15, 2011
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  4. nerdmagic

    nerdmagic Newbie

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    I love FreeBSD as a server and have found it to run very well as a desktop on generic hardware; but I haven't run it on a laptop.

    I agree with Debguy on PC-BSD.

    However, the PC-BSD 8.2 install image allows you to install plain FreeBSD on ZFS root and that is a great way to go.

    The ports collection contains guest extensions for both VMware (emulators/vmware-guestd6) and VBox (emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions).

    FreeBSD takes a little more work to get a nice usable workstation than a modern Linux distro, but it's still very easy if you're a Unix person. You can still install everything you need automagically from packages and ports, and in my experience everything works out of the box. The OS's unadorned simplicity is very attractive.

    For people who prefer GUI configuration tools to working in terminals, FreeBSD would be a poor choice next to the more polished Linux distros like Ubuntu and Mint.
     
    nerdmagic, Aug 16, 2011
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  5. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Notebook Virtuoso

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    Thanks for the info.
     
    Hungry Man, Aug 19, 2011
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