Why PC-BSD Sucks

[Zeph3r]

I thought that it might be interesting to try Linux's 'cousin', UNIX.

First, I downloaded the USB Full Install image and burned the image to a usb flash drive.

After booting from the drive, the installer appeared, and asked me to select a time zone. so far so good

Next, I selected the drive to install onto, the packages I wanted, set the system password, and made a user account.

I came back an hour later, and found that the installer had stopped midway, it was stuck installing the GNOME package, but i waited a few minutes more before rebooting the computer.

On my next install, i installed LXDE and XFCE, (because i hate KDE Heresy! Heresy! )

After I was finally able to install PC-BSD, and booted to the login screen, I found . . . . . NO USER ACCOUNT!

I think that this is the point which a new user goes back to his/her 'other os'.

Anyway, being somewhat *nix savvy, I typed root, and logged in.

I opened the 'PC-BSD Control Panel' and clicked on the 'User Manager' . . . . . nothing! I single-clicked, double-clicked, and triple-clicked!

After about 10 minutes I was getting tired of clicking, <lol> so I opened a terminal, typed adduser, and set things up that way.

Not a good first impression on a first time user.

So i logged in with my new account, running XFCE.

After a little while of playing around with the desktop, I plugged in a usb drive.

And Nothing happened!

No drive icon appeared on the desktop.

Nothing in the file manager either.

Reading up on this, i found that XFCE uses udev in linux, but having no udev support under BSD, drives are auto mounted using a PC-BSD script.

Well, this script must not have been working properly.

So I started up LXDE and was able to read my files off the usb drive.

I opened a mp3 but found out that with my choice of desktops there were no media players!

I decided to reinstall PC-BSD with everything set to the default, which was KDE. I hate KDE!

I still had the same trouble with the user accounts.

At least my drives automounted this time.

I opened an mp3 again, hoping that some music would help my PC-BSD caused headache.

NO SOUND!

NO ****ing SOUND!

<sigh>

I opened the PC-BSD control panel and found nothing on sound or audio at all.

I read the help files and found nothing on sound.

Maybe the PC-BSD programmers are all deaf?

I didn't know this was a distro for the deaf.

BTW, MY SOUND CARD IS A GENERIC AC'97 SOUND CARD USED IN BILLIONS OF PC'S, AND EVERY DESKTOP LINUX DISTRO THAT I HAVE TRIED, WHICH IS SO MANY THAT CAN'T REMEMBER, HAS A DRIVER FOR IT!

You might ask why i didn't open a terminal and start typing arcane commands into it and 'make things work'.

Because I sometimes like things to just work, esp. with a supposely n00b friendly desktop system.

At this point, I decided to go back to my 'other' system, Puppy Linux 5.2.8.

Which works great out of the box, with all hardware support, except for the latest video card drivers, which were easily installed.

Also look at the difference in size, PC-BSD (3280 MB), vs Puppy Linux (125 MB)

Puppy Linux even has more apps installed out of the box than PC-BSD.

TTFN,

Zeph3r