Re: Is FreeBSD ready for desktop (Mozilla Flash)

From: ANC (xxx_nospam_at_takeout_adams-blake.com_nospam)
Date: 09/11/05 

Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 01:03:41 GMT

Conrad wrote:

>
> We're so cool that
> when it doesn't work we sneer at the noob who couldn't, or simply didn't
> have time to cat endless package messages and man pages to make something
> that is laughably mainstream work. In short, we're just cool because we're
> BSD."
>

It's not just BSD. This pretty well sums up Slackware, as well as Debian
(pure). Maybe Alan Hicks (who is here from time to time and is a legitimate
authority (and author) on Slackware) will disagree, but having been a noob
in both groups I can tell you that there is a lot of truth. This is NOT to
say that Slack and Deb are bad distros. No. They are fine... but their
communities are just a bit 'too cool' for their own good... and these days
people just don't want to put up with it.... mainly because 'the people'
are not hackers or hobbyists or programmers (anymore). They are business
folks, Ma and Pa Kettle, Suzie Creamchease, Sandi Soccermom, Joe Sixpack
and the rest of us. They run Ubuntu, Mandrake, Suse... anything by Slack or
Deb. Fortunately, neither distro suffers as the work goes on... Linux is
Linux and most dirstros are more alike these days than different. Not the
case in BSD, as the next paragraph states.

> The reason that the BSDs enjoy "limited amounts of contributors and money"
> is that we're not sitting up and paying attention to reality. And the
> reality is this: More users=better open-source development. But when the
> price of entry is too high, you get fewer users.
>

It looks to me as a rank outsider that BSD is on the verge of a major
popular breakthrough with DesktopBSD and PC-BSD. If the entire BSD
developer community got behind these systems, big (and good) things could
happen. Guys like me, who own small businesses simply MUST HAVE Acrobat 7.0
(so we can fill out forms) and we want Flash, and sound, and all the other
desktop 'stuff' we are used to. We just finished our first year without
Windows:

http://tinyurl.com/bwzkn
as written up in NewsForge last April. We need what we need and won't
compromise. I have a payroll to meet each month!

BSD could be the 'next big thing' if DesktopBSD or PC-BSD gets some
traction.

This much I know. If Apple took their BSD foundation and their Darwin
front-end and sold it for cheap Intel hardware, Linux would disappear... in
about ten minutes!

Al C.

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