PC-BSD review

Intro

I am a newbie. There is no doubt about that. In the windows world, I know more than average. But when it comes to linux or BSD, I’m still in the first stages of getting my feet wet. I once used a linux distro (some version of Suse) for about 1 month without booting into Windows. But then things broke, productivity was lost, and I decided to go back.

For me, a computer needs to work in the first place. In my free time I can tinker with it. I hate it when it goes the other way: needing to tinker with it in order to be able to work with it. And so far my experience is just that: sooner or later it will brake, or I don’t have the time to delve into the manuals to get something to work. Since I’m no fan of Microsoft I keep on looking for replacements of Windows OS.

My last, and best, experience was with Ubuntu. To be honest, it was a fairly good experience. It almost replaced my Windows. Until I broke it getting to try to get some compiler to work and couldn’t build something I wanted. There’s no doubt this could have been fixed if I wanted to, but at that time it was easier to boot into windows so I could continue working, and look at the problem later. But that later didn’t came as I then decided to try Suse 10.0.

My biggest concern with linux are its package managers. My first experience was with RPM on Suse. However, it didn’t take long to experience the problem of dependency hell. Ubuntu’s apt-get is a big improvement for me. Although easy and convenient, a lay user like me got lost in what package exactly I needed to install to get the compiler installed.

So in the end I wondered if linux really was for ordinary users. Users that will devote some time to learn their system, but in order to do interesting things with it, not only in order to solve problems or make things work.

Enter PC-BSD

Enter distrowatch. I like to check it often to keep up with new developments. The last thing that cought my eye was an announcement of release candidate 2 of PC-BSD version 1. I remembered something about it being user-friendly, so I checked out the website. I was thrilled.

Not just because it had kde 3.5, which I was eager to check out, but because it had a revolutionary package system: the PC-BSD package manager using .pbi packages.. What’s so nice about it is that it seems to be developed for people like me. I don’t have to wade through filenames and hope I pick the right one for installation, or be afraid that the system will break. I just download one file and install it just the way it’s done in Windows. The package has all it depends on and installs graphically with an easy dialog.

There seems to be some discussions going on as to whether this is safe or not. I can’t give an opinion about this. I’ll let the experts fight it out. Probably it will be fought out in practice if the system becomes more popular. And becoming more popular is what I hope it will do because for now there aren’t a whole lot of packages available. Things will only improve, I’m sure.