From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jun 13 12:14:32 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C979016A418 for ; Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:14:32 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from stapleton.41@gmail.com) Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (ug-out-1314.google.com [66.249.92.170]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E9B043D48 for ; Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:14:31 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from stapleton.41@gmail.com) Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id k40so624352ugc for ; Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:14:31 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=K59zZij3dGZQp8GBOvrQZAiSey7yV3vU0h3DUjE6L56lyS6noytSNeQQSxxN1xdffjq2esEZfL6exjz1YmwPOehV6fcFBppmYkX5yF6QysIdJhxJUmjn+TXq3AeUhSMekcsmD9HgsMjsQiw9IlpFUuXoi8R1VVpdlnhOka1wF88= Received: by 10.67.100.12 with SMTP id c12mr5354882ugm; Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:24:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.66.236.19 with HTTP; Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:24:08 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <80f4f2b20606120924x12ae763p897cf6211ef87b50@mail.gmail.com> Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:24:08 -0400 From: "Jim Stapleton" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <80f4f2b20606120919l414a3109wbe408cf50d04aefb@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20060612151000.30354.qmail@web35510.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <80f4f2b20606120919l414a3109wbe408cf50d04aefb@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: Im new to FreeBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:14:33 -0000 [resending to newsgroup, since I only replied to the OP] Well, if Crossover Office ran on FreeBSD, I would probably never boot my windows machine except as reference to help family with windows problems. Your hardware issues are quite good enough. Applications: Most non-windows operating systems won't run windows apps. However, with the Wine poject, many will run. For example, I have been playing Master of Orion III on my my BSD machine under wine, and it runs _better_ than in Windows. However, getting office, corel photopaint, visual studios and trillian to install properly seems to be an effort in futility. Crossover office would fix many of these problems, but it doesn't seem to install on FreeBSD, and it seems there is some trickery involved, using multiple operating systems to get it to work (not worth the expert, unless you are a major tech savant I suspect). That being said, the advantages and disadvantages of FreeBSD over the other main x86 candidate, Linux, at least to my experience; (1) Installation - FreeBSD is probably one of the most unpleasant installers to learn, that I've found, it's a lot better in 6.0/6.1 though. It's not gui, which is OK, but there are confusing and redundant options, that let you go out of order, and change things at bad times somtimes, and unless you are quite knoledgeable in the process, you can go out of order and really screw things up. Also, the hard drive configuration tool can have issues with some drive/chipset combos (such as a 120GB IDE Western Digital drive on the IDE chipset of an A8N-E motherboard in my experience). NOTE: Once you learn this, it's not that bad, and to be honest, it's a one time thing. (2) Upkeep - FreeBSD is much easier to keep up than linux. (a) you have this mailing list. I've never seen anyone use "RTFM" here, and even if they do something similar things, they will at least tell you *where* to look. (b) The handbook is VERY well written, and is inordinately useful. (c) Googled howtos and docs for FreeBSD seem to be better written than the linux equivalents. They don't assume nearly as high of a user-knowledge as Linux docs tend to, which is nicer to the novices. (3) Oh Crap! - On those "Oh Crap!" moments, that happen to everyone, some strange thing happens and you have to fix some horrible error. FreeBSDs better documentation, and more helpful error messages make fixing the issues much easier. The hurried newbie will find him/her self reinstalling less, and fixing without reinstalling more, saving a lot of time and effort. BSD is much better here. (4) App install; I've had horrible luck with *nix app installs, they allways seem to have some compilation issue in the source file distributions, unless you have exactly the right setup, and RPMs tend to lead to dependancy hell worse than any I've ever seen, the yucky app "yum" doesn't help this much. Debians "apt-get" is better, but still has it's issues. Ports is insanely reliable, and issues in ports are relatively easy to fix. FreeBSD is much better here. (5) Windows application compatability - Crossover Office unfortunately doesn't work on FreeBSD, so Linux has an advantage here.