Hey,
On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Austad, Jay wrote:
> If you haven't tried freebsd, now is a good time to give it a shot.
I ran FreeBSD for a while. I installed it because, well, I never used it
before.
After about an hour I had it looking and acting exactly like the Linux box
it replaced, with one important exception - X was dog-slow. It was
marginally ok if you weren't using things like transparent aterms and
didn't mind that WindowMaker takes 10 times as long to minimize windows
(ie, 1 second instead of 1/10th of a second).
The local FreeBSD Guru/Bigot told me that apparently if I want X going
fast it means I'm some kind of wimp[1].
I liked the ports collection when it actually worked. I found quite a few
things that didn't work for various degrees of A Good Reason. Ranging from
KDE2 not willing to install itself cause the port maintainer said it's
bad, to Pine+ssl just plain not working for no apparent reason. Both of
those are probably fixed by now (heck, Pine includes SSL by default now)
but you get the idea.
-Yaron
--
[1] Actually the conversation went something like this:
Me: Hey, I installed FreeBSD, and it's neat, but X is dog-slow.
Him: No it's not, look (pointing at own display which is dog-slow).
Me: Um, yeah, you're at 1024x768x8bpp, with small xterms. I'm at
1600x1200 at 32bpp with translucent aterms. And your display is showing
considerable lag too.
Him: Well I'm using linux emulation for the voodoo card.
Me: I've got an nvidia, and it's still slow.
Him: No it's not. FreeBSD is geared towards the server-space, not the
desktop like Linux is.
Me: So you're saying Linux is better as a desktop?
Him: No.