PC-BSD - Review / Comments

Well, after a week straight of having a few minutes or so to myself here and there, and finally feeling a little better other than the Migraines, I decided to use some of my time free to screw with some things online.

I ended up going to Distrowatch, and grabbing about 12 new OSs. One of the ones I got was PC-BSD 8. I had an older version from the 7.x series, but I never really installed it, and with this new one being out, I wanted to give it a shot.

I booted my Laptop up with the CD in the drive, and started installing.

The installation was incredibly easy. You don't need to know very much to get this thing rolling on your machine. I didn't read any installation HOWTO or anything, and just reading the screen was enough for me to know what to do.

The Installer is a nice GUI based install, and it does everything FOR you. It also has a VERY small number of packages that come with it on the CD, but telling it to install from the Network is easy too, and not only that, once you boot, it's even easier to install stuff.

I let it install the 10 or so programs that it came with (Well, extras anyway) like Opera :)

After I got to my desktop, I saw the Package installer. I loaded it up after hearing a sound play to tell me my Desktop was loaded, and this in itself is amazing as no other BSD does sound out of the box...

Anyway, I loaded up the software loader and updates application, and I'm still in shock at how it has some AMAZING stuff. You click on a package category, select a package, it tells you what it is, and looks pretty, and you click a Mouse button, and it grabs it and installs it for you....

Oh by the way, if you like FreeBSD, you can install that too from the installer... It offers both!

I'm just going to go ahead and say this:

PC-BSD gets the gore stamp of approval. I Love it.

Nice review gore. last week when I decided that I want to learn a Unix-like operating system I found FreeBSD, did some searching first and learned that PC-BSD was designed on FreeBSD and would configure stuff for you and bring you right to the GUI. So I chose PCBSD and installed

And just as you said, it all installed easily and I was presented with KDE after signing in. Sound worked too which was amazing, and basically everything you already said. I however did not like KDE and went on the quest to get gnome, and got lost along the way. I ended up however getting upset that everything was bing done for me so I scratched PCBSD in exchange for FreeBSD. I realized you could use the same disk to install FreeBSD but I did want a 64bit build and opted to download the amd64 build of FreeBSD which I have spent a few 12 hour days straight using.

If someone wants to use FreeBSD but is a beginner like myself go for PC-BSD. If you decide to change your mind later you can. Both required me to do some funny Linux wrapper stuff with flash to get it working but the instructions were easy to follow and FreeBSD comes with a neat handbook.

My 3 cents.

I have Free BSD 8.0-RELEASE running on another machine I use for a lot of stuff. Like an FTP Server, some other stuff, games... I like PC-BSD, and it's actually really neat how they managed to make it so much easier. I mean most people who use Linux, are used to booting up, and they have Sound, possible 3D video from the Graphics, and everything else, is mostly point and click. And installing updates is simple. This actually can compete with that.