Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 00:09:11 -0700 From: Kevin Stevens <Kevin_Stevens@pursued-with.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Peter heads back to M$FT WinBloze [integrate X] Message-ID: <BD33953B-AA9D-11D6-BCAB-003065715DA8@pursued-with.net>
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Resent now that I've hacked up my sendmail installation so the list server will speak to me... A second vote for OS X. I don't want to turn this into a .advocacy thread, it's just that I was in the same boat as Peter last year; not with FreeBSD, but Solaris. I'd worked my way up to a Ultra 60 with 768MB of ram, dual processors, and a 15K SCSI drive and Elite3D framebuffer. Though it ran all my server stuff great, the thing was a dog as a desktop. It was slow doing typical 2d kinds of things, Netscape took forever to load; CDE was useless out of the box, and when I finally got Gnome running (I was using the Sun pre-release) it was... amateurish. No consistency between applications; some of them worked, some didn't. It wasn't impossible, just WAY too much work/time than I have to get to where I wanted to be. I figured if anyone could put a GUI on Unix and make it work, it was Apple. I bought a used Pismo Powerbook (512MB, 30GB, 500MHz) and a copy of OS X. Couldn't be happier. I'm sitting here now running iTunes MP3 player - but my MP3s are stored safely on my FreeBSD server (I sold the Ultra) and I'm connected via NFS. I've got a Terminal window open - you can drag and drop folders from the Finder to change directories at will - on my FreeBSDs file system. I'm writing this from the Apple Mail application - it uses an IMAP account on that same server. M$ just released a Remote Desktop Client for OS X, so I have a VNC-like connection to my WinXP games box active too. I've installed a rootless X server app, so if I *do* need an X app it's right there - with drag and drop to the other GUI. This is wireless, of course; I found the source to an app someone wrote for Linux to control my generic WAP via SNMP. Compiles/runs fine on the Powerbook. Hotswapping battery modules works. Sleep works. DVDs work. CD burning works. My USB keychain drive works. All the apps are written to a standard user interface. I haven't run the Classic MacOS more than a few times, just to see what it looked like. I'll probably do a clean install when 10.2 comes out in a month, and do away with the Classic partition. *If* you happen to want a more seamless GUI than you get with Linux/FreeBSD, you might want to take a look at OS X. It's the most useful environment I've been in since my long-lamented Amiga 3000. But it still doesn't have device aliases. ;( KeS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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