VirtualBSD 9.0 Released 65
ReeceTarbert writes "VirtualBSD 9.0 is a desktop-ready FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE built around the XFCE Desktop Environment for good aesthetics and usability, and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes. The most common applications, plugins and multimedia codecs are ready since the first boot and chances are that you'll find VirtualBSD very functional right out of the box. However, it should be noted that VirtualBSD is more a technology demonstrator than a fully fledged distribution, therefore is squarely aimed at people that heard about FreeBSD but have never tried it, didn't have enough time
to build the system from scratch, or have since moved to a different OS but still need their FreeBSD fix from time to time."
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
I've been scouring the internet for info on FreeBSD as I am interested in making a ZFS file server. I have never come across anything negative about it, other than "not bleeding edge". The words I have found most often are "Secure", "Stable", "Scalable" and "Friendly". Benchmarks show it close enough to Linux for average cases and better than Linux for "holy crap the server is getting hammered!" cases.
"And no, ZFS is not a sufficient reason to go through all that pain.": Depends on what you're trying to do. As a server, I hear it's much easier to manage. Everything is well documented and you don't get a "distro", you get a full system. Based on my readings, ZFS is f'n awesome. Not to mention my cousin swears by it for this 10,000+ HDs in his datacenter.
The only real issue BSD has is a limited supported hardware list. What it does support, it does every well, except a few corner cases. Since ATI has an MIT licensed open source driver and they've hired on a lot of Linux devels/engineers, I expect ATI support to get increasingly better over the next 5 years with BSD gaining from the Linux work.
"BSD developers want to keep the system exactly the way it was 30 years ago": They just have a stricter standard for what get's included. From what I've read, "beta" for BSD is like "stable" for Linux. It seems like nothing makes it into the system unless it's ready for the real-world, and it's not marked "stable" until it's been hardened. It even puts Debian stable to shame. When a new hardware feature comes out, they seem to jump on board for Rev3 instead of Rev1. This means they're constantly behind bleeding edge, but that's becoming less and less an issue with current computing power and abstract designs/frameworks.
It's a different product for a different audience, but the audiences are starting to converge because of how technology is moving. Linux and BSD is apples and oranges. Both are great in their own way.
PCBSD (Score:4, Informative)
It was a nice experience to use something else than Linux, and be productive as well