DesktopBSD? What is that?

I’d heard of BSD, of course. However, I never gave the smallest thought to using any flavor of BSD, on the assumption that as a Linux novice, I’d surely be in over my head in what I’d come to regard as “real” UNIX.

A few nights ago, I somehow found myself staring at this article, by Matt Fuller. He’s a FreeBSD user, but makes an honest pass at a fair comparison between FreeBSD and Linux.

Now, understand, I’ve been happily using PCLinuxOS since May of 2007, a period of time which, while short, is far, far longer than I’ve continued to push forward with any of the 10 or so distributions I’ve tried in the past. In 8ish years of on-and-off flirting with Linux, no distro has held my attention or satisfied my needs as well as PCLOS.

However, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to stop trying new things, and Matt’s description of the philosophical and design differences between BSD and Linux convinced me that I had to give BSD a chance. He’s very careful to write in such a way as to avoid portraying BSD and Linux as competitors, and since everyone in the world seems hung up on telling everyone else why only their own choices are the right ones, I’ve got a lot of respect for that viewpoint. Choice is one of the fundamental elements of OSS, is it not?

So as far as Linux goes, I think PCLOS is my stopping point for as far into the future as I can see. But BSD has caught my eye, and by the time I finished Matt’s article I knew I had to give it a try.

The article convinced me that FreeBSD was, for me, the way to go. A bit of googling led me to DesktopBSD – lucky for me, since it’s FreeBSD + some addons for new folks like myself. In comparison to other noobie-friendly BSD distributions that I researched, my biggest reason for choosing DesktopBSD was that it doesn’t deviate from vanilla BSD except for adding tools to improve the noobie experience.

I’ve benefitted from more than one “noobie blog” during my forays into Linuxland, and I hope my recorded experiences here will do the same for someone else who is taking a look at DesktopBSD or FreeBSD.

Here is my upfront admission of the facts:

I am a novice in the Linux world. I can get around, I can fix minor problems with a bit of googling, I can handle day to day activities under Linux. There are still things that I boot to windows for simply because I don’t know how to do them under Linux, or have not yet taken the time to explore the related software under Linux.

I’m a 100%, green as you can be, absolute noobie when it comes to BSD.

When looking at these two facts, I can promise this: I’m going to do stupid things, miss obvious things, do things wrong, do things in the hardest possible way, and generally screw things up over the course of these postings. You’ll follow my steps at your own risk, and I strongly encourage anyone who pulls these posts up in a google search to look for supporting documentation for anything that I state or imply as fact.

In short, as of of this writing you should assume everything I write is wrong.

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