Well even before there was a PBI, one could use the FreeBSD ports collection on PC-BSD to install VirtualBox.

This reminds me of PBI from PC-BSD. Others have pointed out the similarities with Apple / NeXT as well.

For simple applications, it makes sense to do this. However, imagine creating a package for something large like firefox, libreoffice or kde? WIth the mass number of dependencies... it's a nightmare. Do I really need hundreds of copies of a PNG library on my system? What about zlib? gtk+ ?

It got better.

Oh come on.. they have more developers than I have. Can't I have the dying BSD desktop project this year?

I'd rather see them experience the BSOD. The NT4 driver was terrible for their parallel zip drives.

I don't know about OpenBSD, but I can say that it's been much easier to port KDE 3 than KDE 4.x on MidnightBSD. QT4 isn't bad, but a few of the KDE bits are a real hassle. They may have to port a lot of support code first to get it running. I don't think people realize the amount of work it takes to port KDE and GNOME. They are huge.

The great thing about HTML5 is that it runs on many devices unlike Silverlight. With HTML5, there is a chance that I can actually stream content on my tablet, *BSD or Linux computer, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or consoles in my home. Netflix managed to get Wii, PS3, iPhone, iPad, etc. to stream their content so obviously they can already do it without silverlight. With both flash and silverlight dying, netflix has to find a solution to this problem.

Well you don't expect the guy to buy a Samsung do you?

Not only is this funny, it's the sad truth.

As someone who's been trying to do a desktop BSD based OS for several years, I cannot recommend it for general use yet.

On the FreeBSD front, if your computer has Intel or NVIDIA graphics and it's not one of those crappy pseudo NVIDIA cards found in new laptops, you might be OK on video with simply installing a driver and configuring X. If you have AMD/ATI graphics newer than the 4000 series, run away. You'll get VESA mode.

For WIFI, anything older than FreeBSD 9 is terrible. Many WIFI chips with 802.11n don't work. USB bus devices don't work on FreeBSD 7.x with some working in 8 and many working in 9.

Sound card support is a mixed bag. PC-BSD was unable to detect the sound card in my Toshiba laptop. To be fair, Debian didn't work either until I went to unstable and did a lot of hacks.

PC-BSD has switched from a KDE distro of FreeBSD to a desktop neutral product. They're migrating from their current package management system to pkgng. When things settle down, it may be a good choice, but right now you could have serious upgrade pains.

Having said all this, I successfully used FreeBSD at two different jobs over several years as a desktop workstation. I'm a computer programmer that has worked with Java, PHP and Perl in the past and it was a great fit. I used KDE for my desktop environment and OpenOffice. Flash worked most of the time, thunderbird and firefox worked fine and Chromium is even available now. For work purposes, it was fine.

At home, I find *BSD to be lacking right now for consuming content. It's not even as good as Linux at running WINE so many windows apps don't work. There aren't enough alternatives running natively to work around things. I'd love to be in a open format utopia, but it's not reality and I like many people have bought iTunes and Steam content using DRM. Steam for Linux is a reality, but not steam for BSD.

Here's where your argument falls apart. By the logic you're using, if a company makes money on copyright infringement they should be stopped. What about all the PCs and Macs used to pirate movies, rip songs, etc? One can argue early versions of iTunes and Windows Media Player/encoder were used to pirate content. What about the MP3 codecs? How many people used them for legitimate purposes early on? P2P technology is another example. Blizzard distributes patches using P2P, but most of it's use is to pirate movies, music and software. Should all P2P software providers be shut down even though Blizzard and the Linux community have decided to use it for good?

Technology is not bad in itself. Youtube is a platform for distributing content. Some users choose to use it for evil. Mega Upload was the same thing. It was a convenient service. What got him into trouble was how he was storing the content. By keeping one copy, it was easy to argue that when a request came in that he should remove all user's instances of the file. However, he wouldn't know if any of those users had a legitimate claim to have the file. From a technical perspective, it was just dedup at a simple level, but business people don't get that.

Mega is a slimy guy, and he was at the line, but I don't think he crossed it with both feet.

Copyright infringement comes down to one thing, as a society do we want free access to art or do we want to only allow the privileged who can afford it, to have access.

netatalk is in ports. It's an AFP implementation. It worked well with Classic and old versions of OS X, but I've had better luck with Samba mounts in the last few releases. However, you still need it for TimeMachine.

I just wish the PHP guys would actually put some of those useful comments in the documentation at the top. How many times have I had to look at the comments below to find out how something really works or that it's broken in 5.1.6 but magically works in 5.2, etc.

In order to do that, they'd have to do a lot of work on graphics drivers. FreeBSD has nvidia binary blobs and decent support for Intel graphics in recent releases, but AMD/ATI graphics are a joke.

If you want to boot linux fast, get the mac mini instead or an iMac. The ancient xeons in the Mac Pro are dated at this point. Some benchmarks indicate the ivy bridge chips in the "lowend" macs are faster, especially compared to the entry mac pro.

I replaced a mac pro with a mini in december and it's been a big upgrade except for disk. Now I've got a bunch of USB enclosures all over my desk to make up for the loss of disks, but at least it's got USB3. I don't get people who prefer this... having the drives inside the computer is so much less clutter.

Their appearance was similar. There are many changes in 98SE that proved to be both good and bad. It had better support for USB and AGP video cards, but it also enabled full PNP. PCI cards would go wherever they wanted and it was not uncommon for half the devices in your system to be on the same IRQ. It was tolerable unless you had buggy hardware like the Acer laptop I had or an AMD CPU + via chipset motherboard.

I had to reinstall 98SE every three months and I only used it for gaming. It would blue screen randomly. It was a flaming pile.

Conversely, NT4 SP3+ was a nice OS with only one flaw. Drivers could kill the kernel way to easily. Iomega's zip drive drivers were quite bad as were some scsi controllers.