This is really a summary of my month in FreeBSD so will be a little shorter than my previous posts.
Well its week four and I have been using FreeBSD as my daily driver on my laptop for four weeks. Installation, configuring, re-configuring, installing software and general use.
I have had allot of fun with FreeBSD and learned allot in the process. I have been a Linux user since the 90's and Linux users from around that time, will remember that Linux, even the out of the box distros, were still 'some assembly required'
I am a Ubuntu user and have been since 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog and have had the luxury of an out of the box 'no assembly required' workstation for a long time, which I am not complaining about at all but, when you use something like FreeBSD you do realise that over the years, you have become a bit rusty and forgotten how to get your hands dirty.
So there are two question to be answered.
- Will I keep FreeBSD on my laptop ?
- Will I continue to use FreeBSD on the desktop ?
Will I keep FreeBSD on my laptop ?
No. The reason for this decision is, my laptop is an everything computer. Work, home, cafe etc, so I really need a true 'no assembly required' OS and for me that is Ubuntu. I am actually writing this on my laptop with the Ubuntu drive back in. I was planning on keeping FreeBSD a little longer, but a work issue arose, that I couldn't do with out allot of configuring of FreeBSD. So work took precedent and I had to swap out the drives a little early.
I probably could have configured it to do the job but, in my line of work which is Information Management and digital preservation you never know what you're going to get sometimes, so I need something I can either use instantly or very quickly install software/hardware to complete the job and Ubuntu hit's the spot.
Will I continue to use FreeBSD on the desktop ?
Yes I will continue to use FreeBSD, I am planning on installing it on a secondary desktop machine and continue to work and learn more about it. I really enjoy running FreeBSD it puts the excitement back into computing I think.
Hopefully at some point, I will be advanced enough to build true out of the box experience.
Well that about raps up my month with FreeBSD.
I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone have a go and try out FreeBSD, if you can install it on hardware it's a much better experience than vertualisation. but if you can't VertualBox works just fine.
R.