At work, we use FreeBSD on our servers, and I don’t know jack squat about it. So, I decided to install Gentoo/FreeBSD on my laptop at home to try it out. Amazingly enough, I managed to get it setup without any hitches at all, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. I’m doing this in a meager attempt to learn BSD in a roundabout way, so we’ll see what happens. Besides, I don’t really use my laptop for anything more than just surfing the web in bed, and now I’ve got it tri-booting between that, Linux, and XP.
I also joined the bsd herd, mostly in an attempt to clean up the bad dependencies I always see, and that frustrate me as a user. My passive goal is to get some more stuff keyworded so it can be used easily as a desktop distribution. I’m really not planning on putting much work into it, since I just consider it a side hobby and intellectual curiosity more than anything.
One thing that really surprises me so far is how much stuff does work natively for the distro. I thought BSD’s package list would be far more inferior than the list that Gentoo Linux has access to, but I’ve fortunately been proven very wrong. So far, the only thing I’ve run into that wasn’t keyworded was unfoo and something else I can’t remember, and I already keyworded unfoo. 🙂
I’ll be following up hopefully with more blog posts on how well it works as a general desktop. I’m feeling pretty optimistic, though.
The main thing I like about BSD over Gentoo is that ports/packages is, imho, far superior to portage. Three reasons why:
1) almost all packages have a binary install option
2) the binary install option and source install option are closely connected
3) makefiles are superior to ebuilds
– makefiles are completely standard
– makefiles only rely on make… ebuilds rely on python…