PC-BSD or DesktopBSD

[intoDesign.ca]

Has anyone tried these variants of BSD? I am intrigued by them, however am turned off by the lack of hardware / wireless support. Does anyone have any stories to share?

[AK Dave]

BSD has fewer people contributing work on kernel modules to support specific hardware, so you have to be more picky about what hardware you purchase to build a BSD box.

Run it in a VM and its fine.

[nitehawk]

Both PC-Bsd and DesktopBSD were developed as a "friendlier" desktop over FreeBSD. However,...it looks as if DesktopBSD isn't being developed anymore,...and is now getting pretty far out-of-date...

http://www.osnews.com/story/21628/Deskt ... _to_a_Halt

Also,...PC-Bsd is a KDE desktop (over FreeBSD 7.2). However,...their forum doesn't seem to have much activity of late (unless you count the tumbleweeds and spam) ......
I heard one of the main moderators of the forum say that he,...and most of the others, had just moved on from PC-Bsd to FreeBSD. I would (personally) consider just learning FreeBSD,...as it is quite active with a good number of software (if you were considering a BSD.) (but,..as "AK Dave" just mentioned,....any of the BSDs aren't anywhere NEAR as active as Linux)

[pad-thai]

I haven't looked at these in about a year, but at the time, PC was considered the user friendly BSD of choice. i personally have hardware problems upstream in Free, so I can't use any of them. There's also netBSd and OpenBSD, but if you want user friendly, probably none of net/open/free are for you.

There's a few other lesser known BSD variants (like Dragonfly). Check osdisc.com to see what they list.

[DrHu]

I started out using bsd, Openbsd a long time ago, and have also tried pcbsd and desktopbsd about 1-2years back, but essentially, apart from the parents (openbsd, netbsd, freebsd), the desktop friendly? versions as pcbsd and desktopbsd were not as active as Linux for a long time (the last 10years or so), although there are a few bsd appliances, and some security products

• As a desktop, even with Linux compatible mode, it just doesn't cut it, in terms of the later applications or desktop appearance..

--although I do quite like their bsd partitioning scheme/slices, and their disk drivers; if I was going to use it again, I would probably go for Freebsd, possibly netbsd rather than openbsd (which is a little too much command line oriented)
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/

I think desktop bsd is the better version; and I think it installs better.
--as it uses ports as its package management system; and doesn't change the underlying system as much as pcbsd.

If you like windows you might prefer pcbsd, as it uses binary download packages *.pbi files, instead of ports, although it can also use ports
ports is where most of bsd packages reside.., so it tends to make sense to make use of those repositories as available, rather than spin off on your own

Like Mint uses ubuntu repositories for the most part.