Open/Free BSD

[rideburton56]

Hi All,

In my newly sparked interest in all FOSS, I have come across the BSD variants.

It seems like an interesting concept if, for nothing else, just to explore, being that the programs, kernel, etc is all maintained and updated by a unified group of people, as opposed to ubuntu, where one group has input on the kernel, another with input on the OS, another with input on applications, etc. I also like the fact that they are more closely related with the SUS.

It seems that freebsd or openbsd would be the two that appeal to me the most. Has anyone ever tried either of them out? Do they come with a GUI? Can I run GNOME or XFCE on them?

Also, if this would be better posted in a different forum, just let me know!

[Cypher]

I'm not sure I understand your understanding of how Ubunut/Linux works..but anyway..

Free/Open/NetBSD can have GUIs if you wish them to have it. But the last I played with FreeBSD (many years ago) it was all text based. FreeBSD is really primarily used in a server environment where the reliance or need for a GUI is minimal..

I'm sure there are BSD forums that will have much better reponses than this Ubuntu forum..

[Zzl1xndd]

OpenBSD is pretty and IMHO it as a good stable OS and could be used for Day to day life.

That being said every time I used any BSD it always felt a little behind the Linuxs of the day, at least on the end user side.

[kk0sse54]

This should be moved to the BSD subforum but otherwise of course you can run xfce, gnome, KDE, and heck even sawfish in all the *BSDs. FreeBSD might be a good choice since it has the largest community otherwise try out DesktopBSD or PC-BSD for user friendly versions of FreeBSD. I've never tried OpenBSD but if you're a minimalist I would recommend NetBSD (my favorite of them all) since it's very clean and minimal but be warned it's one of the more advanced *BSD since it takes a lot of configuration with no CLI or GUI tools. The one advantage that Linux has *BSDs is it's usual superior hardware suppport for example there's no proprietary drivers for ati cards in *BSD but the open source radeonhd should work just fine :).

[cardinals_fan]

If you want a GUI (more than TWM, that is ;)) out-of-the-box, I recommend DesktopBSD (essentially FreeBSD with some wizards and KDE). Otherwise, FreeBSD is the best-known and NetBSD is my favorite.