FreeBSD, an actual joy
Posted 2 February 10:02

I am a long time Linux user, started using it in the late 90s and compared to Windows it was (and still is) an absolute joy to use. I had been aware of FreeBSD for some time, infact I even tried version 6 but at the time I didn't really know what I was doing so stuck with Linux. For the past year or so I have been using FreeBSD as a server on a Virtual Machine, I chose it because it had a smaller memory footprint and seemed to have a very quick boot up time - perfect for a VM on a budget laptop. This proved highly useful late last year when I discovered a hosting company that provides Virtual Dedicated Servers, like a Virtual Private Server you get root access, but you also install and manage the OS yourself - no wasted disk space on silly control panels, plus complete control over what software is installed. I must admit times are tough, I took the cheapest option which only gives me 10Gb of disk space, so it seemed FreeBSD was the perfect choice for me. And as you can see from the powered by image on every page, that is what I stuck with.

This is all well and good for servers, FreeBSD is proven as a solid server operating system, but what about in the Desktop world? Well, like Linux, FreeBSD supports all things GNU and your FreeBSD desktop doesn't look all that different from your Linux desktop, X.Org is it's usual wonderful self, WMs such as GNOME and KDE are also available. You can also install them as binary packages, the same as you would with yum or apt.

The big difference, and absolute selling point for me is the FreeBSD ports collection. This is a massive (23,090 at time of writing) collection of ported software in source form. How is this different from downloading a source package and compiling on Linux? Well, the ports collection is created so that any dependencies the program you are compiling may have are automatically downloaded and compiled too! Now of course compiling almost your entire system from source is going to take time. I have an AMD V160 CPU with 1.75Gb RAM, the monsters to install were:

• X.Org: about 3 hours
• GNOME2 (with gdm): about 6 hours
• Firefox 9: about 4 hours
• Chromium: about 3 hours

I decided not to use GNOME or KDE, instead I went with XFCE4, which didn't take too long to compile (but only because I had already GTK2 with GNOME).

Having Fedora Linux already installed it was very easy to make use of grub2 to get my new FreeBSD install to boot, it's quite interesting having a tri-booting system too!

So now I have a lovely new FreeBSD desktop system to play with, so far it seems a little quicker and more stable than Fedora Linux running on the same machine. And of course it's MUCH quicker than Windows 7! If you have the disk space to spare, and a little patience, I would definitely recommend getting yourself FreeBSD now.

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