I think you really should try Debian instead of FreeBSD or both.. Debian is really great for everything and the huge number of packages is a great advantage. Another distro I think you should take a look is SUSE. Many magazines and tv shows I see, experts say they use SUSE, so It must be something. I don't really know this distro very well, but as I said I read a lot about it, but debian is something you'll like. the only problem with Debian is the time that new versions take to be realeased. From 'woody' to 'sarge' for example it was 3 years if I'm not wrong.

I am new to linux but I've been running Slackware for a few weeks. I liked it immediately and decided to keep it. In the meantime I've been trialing other distros and I have been playing with Debian for a couple of days. It is fun to be able to get most apps very quickly. But it's a drag trying to figure out what's installed and if you don't issue the right command when you remove something, the base package gets removed but the prereqs stay around. So you wind up with a lot of sh$t on your system that you don't want. When you know what you're doing with Debian (like anything else) you can keep the shop clean. But it's a little confusing at the beginning.

I'm starting to learn that distros have a lot of personality. Sometimes you find one that just feels right- for me that was Slackware. I would also like to find a plug-and-play distro so I can fool around with new and cool apps, so that's why I tried Debian. I think it's pretty good, but I'm still looking.

Rubix looks like another good distro. I was impressed with what I read on the forums over there- Rubin looks like he's pretty sano. It's like Slackware with pacman. You might be into something like that.

Let us know what you find in your travels because anytime we have spare real-estate on the hard drive you know we will be lookin' for new distros to try.

I were choosing between Slack and FreeBSD, then I would go for FreeBSD although I think Slack is a very good OS. Both OSes rely heavily on manual configuration, but with FreeBSD, you have access to thousands of prebuilt packages which you can install using sysinstall or pkg_add (which can fetch and install packages from remote locations). You also have access to thousands of packages in the ports system. pkg_add and ports automatically resolve and install dependencies, so you don't have to spend a lot of time doing this manually. The beauty of FreeBSD ports (just like portage) is that if you like bleeding edge packages, they are usually available before any binaries are released for the major Linux distros.

Its fairly easy to setup gnome using pkg_add or ports (with 1 or 2 commands you can install all of gnome). If using pkg_add you can install GNOME as follows
and using ports
The GNOME screenshot in my signature is from FreeBSD 6.0.

FreeBSD maybe a different OS, but it has a lot of similarities to Linux, so you won't be totally lost. There is a very good handbook which you can use for reference. If you have used a text based installer for Linux, then I am sure you won't have any major problems installing FreeBSD.

thank you for your message. I'll take a look at this handbook you mentioned. The major problem really is in the differences between Linux and FreeBSD, because I have no experience in *BSD family. So, everything I'll be able to do on FreeBSD depends on how much linux and freebsd are similars (commands, etc) and they don't really seem to have that much of stuff alike. Well, thank you again for you post.

The basic commands in most UNIX and UNIX like systems are quite similar so if you are comfortable with Linux, Solaris, *BSD etc, its fairly eay to get to grips with a similar OS. Obviously there will be some things that are specific to an OS (just like in different Linux distros) but you can pick these up as you get used to the OS. You can try PC-BSD, Desktop-BSD or Freesbie Live CDs and check it out yourself.

Well, I didn't try Slackware back, but I did try FreeBSD 6.0... and I now use Gentoo. :/

I would like to use FreeBSD, and I would be proud to tell everyone I'm using it, but... I DO feel a little bit uncomfortable. I followed the handbook to install most of my apps. It was working fine. I used Xfce-4, just as in Linux. Ports and packages are great. But... Some things I haven't been able to set up were disturbing me, and I turned back to Gentoo when I crashed my FreeBSD box.

First, following the handbook, I couldn't even compile a GENERIC kernel.
Second, I couldn't get a nice console in 1024x768 like in Linux.
Third, my Audigy 2 was hard to set up working, and still doesn't work in 5.1 surround.
Fourth, following the handbook again to update my whole FreeBSD box crashed it.
Fifth, I really didn't feel comfortable with the environment.

I like FreeBSD, and I'll probably install it on my small web server, but I don't really liked it as a desktop OS. Lack of drivers and complicated turn-arounds to get some simple things working was too much for me. It's not that I don't like to use the shell or I don't like to play around a little bit to get things to work, but it was just TOO much. I use Gentoo, and I'm used to using the shell and config files. I like it that way. But there must be a break somewhere...


Well, that was my opinion. So I'm back to Gentoo, waiting for a new app to compile =P It is really not this bad if you aren't in an hurry. And since I'll change my whole PC soon, compile times will be less of an headache. =)


Ho, and meantime, I tried Debian, Arch, Ubuntu... But still I'm going back to Gentoo. Why? Because everything works. You compile everything to support what you want, so everything work the way you want it.
When I installed mplayer in Debian, it couldn't read wmv files. Needed something more... Well in Gentoo, with the appropriate USE flag, the tools needed by mplayer to play wmv files are fetched and compiled automatically by emerge. That's the only example coming to my mind, but there was a lot of stuff like this.