DesktopBSD 1.0 Final Released

Don Church writes "DesktopBSD is reporting that the 1.0 Final of DesktopBSD was released today for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. This cutting edge FreeBSD derivative now includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices. The DVD release even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software ready to go. They are offering downloads via several mirrors or the official torrent."

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Chrismith]

The sort of people who don't know the difference between Pentium and Intel probably aren't going to be installing this anyway, made for novices or not.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Necrotica]

You're comparing apples to oranges. FreeBSD is a single, cohesive operating system. DesktopBSD is a single, cohesive operating system. They are two distinctly different operating systems.

That would be like saying, "I installed Debian stable on my computer and I found that all of the software was out of date. Therefore Genoo must be out of date as well." We both know that's not accurate.

Having not installed DesktopBSD before, maybe they have some new tools for ports for "everyday" users. I have never had problems with ports on my FreeBSD servers, btw - but I also read /usr/ports/UPGRADING before I use portupgrade.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

I AM FISH!

Re:choice is good, but ...

[evilviper]

BAD MODS!

This is just a baseless troll, without any real information.

At any given time, I was never able to run more than about 75% of the desktop apps that I wanted to run. I tried portupgrade, but that often did more harm than good.

WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package. They ALL compile and install perfectly every time. Hell, I've UPGRADED my system from FreeBSD version to version, never bothered uninstalling the old ports, and everything continues to work fine. I've never seen ANY other OS handle upgrades remotely as gracefully.

Besides, even if you did have a problem with compiling from ports (which I have a very hard time believing), why didn't you just install from the binary packages, instead?

I can't believe this is anything other than another anti-BSD troll.

PC-BSD

[Snowgen]

I wonder how this differs from PC-BSD [pcbsd.org].

They managed to ship earlier despite a later start. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Just Some Guy]

Sure KDE can be a hog, but it's either more of a hog on FreeBSD or FreeBSD just doesn't pay attention to a desktop user's needs.

I recently switched my work desktop from FreeBSD to Gentoo because of a harddrive failure and the need to try something different. I think you're at least partially right: KDE "felt" much more responsive under Linux than FreeBSD, even under the same hardware, compiled with the same compiler version, and using similar CFLAGS.

However, I think that's partly because FreeBSD has traditionally been optimized for throughput instead of interactivity. On idle systems, Linux seems to respond more quickly to user input. However, the FreeBSD system seemed to stand up better to high loads than Linux ("how on earth did my load average get up to 10? It's been there for how long?") without becoming jerky or noticeably less responsive.

I have zero real evidence to support this idea, but personal observation makes me think I'm basically right. Maybe you were seeing the same low-load behavior but didn't notice the corresponding high-load advantage?

Re:The newbie's question

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the short answer: download an ISO, install in on a spare partition, run it for a few weeks/days and do interesting things with. Learning a new OS is like learning a new programming language: you can write the same trivial programs in any language, but if you want to know what makes them unique, you have to do a variety of non-trivial things with each in order to understand them.

Any attempt by anyone to "explain" it without you using it would really be insufficient.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[jdog1016]

Oh please. I have used FreeBSD for about 6 years now, and I can recall numerous times where ports broke after a portupgrade. It happens--you just have to know to contact the port's maintainer.

Having said that, my first linux system was redhat 6.0. I didn't use linux for a number of years, and just started using gentoo a few months ago, so I don't know too much about it yet. But I do know this: FreeBSD doesn't buckle under load. During a port install, I/O is essentially unaffected. From what I have seen, this is nowhere near the case with Linux. The only reason that I switched to linux is that FreeBSD amd64 support has been lacking. If something has changed and this DesktopBSD thing is really nice, I might consider switching back.