Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 01:48:42 -0500 From: Jonathan <j.e.drews@worldnet.att.net> To: Advocacy <freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: A case of FreeBSD users shooting all FreeBSD users in the foot? Message-ID: <200310110148.42949.j.e.drews@worldnet.att.net> In-Reply-To: <002801c38fb1$95e804e0$0200a8c0@sbcgolbal.net> References: <002801c38fb1$95e804e0$0200a8c0@sbcgolbal.net>
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On Friday 10 October 2003 11:38 pm, R.Bagby wrote: > Found this on a google search. > > The comments were incredible. > > Very unfortunate if this is the only view people have of FreeBSD users. I read a few of the comments and they paint a very unflattering view of the FreeBSD community. Unfortunately, FreeBSD has brought some of this upon themselves. 1) Most newbies require CD's to do an install yet FreeBSD mall has terrible advertising for it's CD's. There are no screenshots of Gnome or Kde and no package descriptions whatsoever. You don't see anything like this (GNOME) http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/screenshots.html or this (KDE) http://freebsd.kde.org/screenshots.php at FreeBSD mall. Furthermore OpenOffice is not on the RELEASE Cd's. That is a huge mistake. 2) The documentation is sometimes too vague and aimed at computer professionals. I tried to configure a firewall using "Dialup firewalling with FreeBSD" and I could not get it to work ( http://www.freebsd.org/doc/ en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/dialup-firewall/index.html ). I finally went and read the tutorials at obfuscation.org. I say sometimes because for the most part the documentation is extremely good. Newbies require straight forward imperative commands like so: a) to configure IPF do: step 1) make a file in /etc called ipf.rules like so: block in all pass in on dc0 all pass out on dc0 all pass out on tun0 proto udp from any to any keep state pass out on tun0 proto tcp from any to any keep state step 2) ..... There is a tendency to over explain things. Don't tell me about the birth pains, just deliver the baby. The detailed explanations are best left to Greg Lehey's book, The Complete FreeBSD. 3) While FreeBSD ports are generally very good there is little coordination amongst the ports maintainers. That is if the ghostscript port gets changed, I find out about it when it breaks printing in the word processors. For a hobbyist it's an annoyance, for a company using FreeBSD desktops it's a disaster. I am not a troll, I am most interested that FreeBSD prospers. I run FreeBSD 4.8 on my used ThinkPad 600E and I have WiFi, USB scanning, USB printing, sound, the winmodem and X working. FreeBSD makes a great desktop OS. -- Kind regards, Jonathan
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