FreeBSD, good and bad

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I have Windows 2000 and I'm thinking of switching over to FreeBSD. What would be some pros and cons?

What is motivating you to consider a switch?

Jon

Some pros:

Free, as in 'free beer', you can modify FreeBSD sourcecode into a closed proprietary system.

Stable

relatively secure


Some cons:

difficult for new users to install/configure/maintain

requires at least general knowlege of UNIX commands



You have not stated that you have any experience with UNIX systems, which are quite differant from MS systems. If you are fairly well versed with UNIX, you will find Free BSD to be quite robust and usable, OTOH, if you're not, I'd seriously consider some of the easier Linux distributions before using FreeBSD.

I don't have knowledge of UNIX commands. Which other Linux operating systems would you recommend? I have grown up with Windows 3.1, 98, XP and now, on my own computer, I'm using 2000

What's encouraging me? A friend has it and says he likes it, so I wanted to find out what other users have to say.

FreeBSD is not Linux or a derivative, so far as I'm aware. Last time I looked closely into the operating system kernel (I sometimes write small operating systems for embedded products) was back when William and Lynne Jolitz wrote some articles about it around 1990, I think. I particularly liked the clean design and use of the 80386 task state segment. Linux came out of an entirely different development path.

I have more confidence in the FreeBSD kernel, having looked over the 'mess' that is Linux and compared some of the two (admittedly at different times, though.) But Linux has way, way more application support.

You could find a spare machine (or hard drive) and load up a Linux or FreeBSD system and play with it. You can get one of the ubuntu forms of Linux, for example, as their organization in the UK will ship you free CDs just for asking. Check it out.

Plan on a learning curve if all you know now is Windows. But you will have to pay that price if you are going to give it a fair shake. (I cut my "c"-teeth on the Unix v6 kernel, back in the late 1970's, so I'm comfortable with unix look-alikes from long experience.) It just takes time to work out what is what.

Jon

Before going "whole hog" with a freebsd conversion, you might want to try as jonk said installing it on a different system or drive and dual booting for awhile.

You could also try out installing it in Virtual Box to play with it.

Freebsd is generally harder to use than most linux distros and will definitely be harder to use than Win2k. It is a solid OS and tends to have

Good responses, IMHO. I haven't used FreeBSD for a while; a few years back I picked up a $5.00 AT at a garage sale (one of those big, heavy, "Tanks") when I spotted the list of installed components:

1GB SCSI HD
SCSI CD-Rom
Adaptec 2920 or something like, those used to sell for around $280.00
32MB ram IIRC; and I think I may have put a spare 32 in for 64MB
Classic 3-way 10 Base-T ethernet card - fat & thin coaxial ethernet & RJ-45 Cat 5

I installed the highest FreeBSD that I had on hand:

Set it up as a server, but really only used it experimentally, for my own, "Teach Yourself CS at Home" purposes

I found BSD easy for me to set up for the basics, X-windows, etc, with the help of the web, but then I've always been pretty intelligent, and persistant at anything I really wanted to learn; 'nix is designed pretty logically, and I found that, although 'C' and the scripts derived from it have a learning curve, I could still begin to fathom what was going on without too much trouble.

I discovered that for X-apps especially, it has a Linux compatibility layer to provide access to those, but as to native 'nix X-apps, those tend to be in limited supply, IME, just because of supply and demand.

Definitely I had the inquisitive nature, and a good technical foundation, all of which made it easier for me than folks without some similar background, to use FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 9.1 is easy to use if you can RTFM and do daily tasks in the shell.

Programs I normally use:

- Pandoc
- TeX Live
- Vim
- Irssi
- tmux
- zsh

I use more, but I'm getting tired. I'm kinda sick right now...

Considering the fact that my last reply to this thread was almost 6 years ago, anybody interested in Free BSD might want to check out PCBSD, which makes a full BSD install with Desktop environment about as painless as a Gentoo Linux Install. Sure you can go the hard route and install / compile via portage, and in many cases as far as software goes you probably will have to, but at least you can get a fully working system with one of the major DE's relatively painlessly.

However, PC-BSD seems to deviate in its location of config files, which I don't like.

PC-BSD should have as much pre-configuration as possible without unnecessary forking of the FreeBSD defaults.

And, the fact that one can't yet view Unicode characters in the default console is a disappointment.

Oh, well. jfbterm will do the job...

Personally, I've had trouble with most of the BSDs in getting support for my wireless hardware. With FreeBSD 9.1, when the iwn KLD is loaded and the wifi interface brought up, then entire system freezes. Running them in a QEMU VM under Crunchbang has worked for the interim in getting to know BSD conventions. Out of them, DragonflyBSD had the least troublesome installation process.

I've been running Linux distros like Crunchbang, but have started exploring the BSDs. I thought I was getting somewhere with PCBSD but it did not want to run the Apps i got from the AppCafe. They would fail to launch Chromium or AbiWord.

I backed up and managed to get FreeBSD up with Xfce. I'm doing it again to confirm the steps I put together are right and I'm going to try out KDE.

I was also curious about DragonFly, but it seemed maybe overkill or designed more for Servers. If a person just wants to slap a Desktop onto a BSD is DragonFly a good Solution?

Another way to ease transition: Leave 2000 on the PC. Use Bootable Live CD GhostBSD (it's Free BSD). The BSDs take more skilled care & feeding to use as desktops. If you want your life to be easier use Linux Mint, Xubuntu, Centos or a tweaked version called Stella. The learning curve is way easier and can be delayed (The GUI is good enough you can put off learning command line stuff for quite a while). You are quite likely using an older PC, so actually Slitaz or one of the Puppy Linuxes is what you need. You'll be surprised how fast they are. And you can run Puppy off CD without ever installing it.

whoah totally necro dude!

just kidding...lol

FreeBSD is faster and more stable than both Windows and Linux, can run most types of Linux software via a compatibility layer (but not vice versa) and has a code structure that's far less messy than that of Linux. Having said that, the library of native software is very limited--and almost all system crashes in Windows are due to faulty kernel space drivers, not the Windows OS itself.

Just wondered if anyone has had any luck running GhostBSD. I like the idea of it more than PC-BSD, but I've had problems with the installer.