Re: New Users Learning FreeBSD

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To: "Loren M. Lang" <lorenl@alzatex.com>, FreeBSD Mailing list <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 11:52:58 -0800

My less than complimentary thought is that they all suck, but that's only
because 99% of the developers who are writing code for *Linux/*BSD don't
really care about the "new user experience." They care about whatever it is
they are developing.

Thus the difference between say "standard install" from a FreeBSD distro CD
and sticking a Windows XP install CD into your computer is vastly different
in favor of the Microsoft product.

In a weird and scary way I helped contribute to this because I worked at Sun
back in the day when Sun was doing a 386 based workstation and the folks who
worked in Chelmsford were trying to put a much better "face" on SunOS
(4.0.2). Like other people in the systems group I was fairly disparaging
about "gratuitous changes" to hide unnecessary things from the user (Sun East
had a splash screen with a "thermometer" display like you see in Win9x/NT/XP
these days. I didn't realize just how ahead of the game they were. I look
back today and realize I made a big mistake by not being more supportive of
their efforts.

To your direct question, I think newbies should install something tha someone
they know has already installed and become experienced on. Otherwise the
initial frustration of not being to get anywhere until it "clicks" can really
turn them off to the thought of Open Source based systems. A friend of mine,
an engineer, spent a really rough day trying to get FreeBSD running on his
laptop. Debian Linux however came right up. I've been more successful getting
NetBSD and FreeBSD running, but I've got a BSD background so don't count as a
"newbie" so much (grumpy old fart perhaps, but not a newbie :-)

--Chuck

On Friday 05 March 2004 00:16, Loren M. Lang wrote:
> I am curious what some newbies experiences were with FreeBSD who have
> have no unix experience before. I have someone that I might be setting
> up a unix workstation of some kind for and I'm debating whether I should
> use FreeBSD or some Linux distro like mandrake or debian. I will be
> there most of the time to help if needed as this is for work and will
> not be his home desktop, at least not yet. He only have some experience
> with using dos and windoze, but he does have some technical background
> with computers.

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• Previous message: George Swentek: "Antivir doesn't work on local 5.x file system, but works fine on mounted ..."
• In reply to: Loren M. Lang: "New Users Learning FreeBSD"
• Next in thread: Joshua Lokken: "Re: New Users Learning FreeBSD"
• Reply: Joshua Lokken: "Re: New Users Learning FreeBSD"
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