The Linux Extremist

A phrase which truly summarises PC BSD could be: “A good idea, but not ready for prime time”. This occured to me after I had my third Firefox crash whilst using it.

The Firefox crashes were the last, but not the only straw. After having successfully installed it, I found a number of small frustrations:

1. USB support; to put it mildly, is inconsistent. A port which would read a USB key fine at one point couldn’t see it at another. I thought this might be a problem peculiar to PC BSD; I attempted to install DesktopBSD instead this morning and found the same issues. Before any desktop variant of BSD is ready for “prime time”, this definitely needs to be addressed.

2. Firefox instability; I have never seen it behave so badly on any system before. 3 crashes in the course of one evening is unheard of. In contrast, Opera 9 appears to work well with PC BSD.

3. Fonts. I was driven mad by the system fonts (it was the font used in Konsole) that kept re-emerging and could not be changed. Some programmes were able to resist this overriding option, namely Opera 9. However, Firefox, Thunderbird and gFTP were all programmes that fell to it.

4. Booting. PC BSD appeared to boot much more slowly than Ubuntu Linux. Part of this may be perception; the “System loading…please wait” screen without any idea of progress of the boot can lead the user to think the system has hanged. I suggest that the developers of PC BSD need to give better messaging during startup so that the user can know that all is well.

5. Shut down. PC BSD is also very slow is switching off. Worse, a bug developed which meant that my PC could not shut down automatically; I had to do a fresh install to remedy the problem.

In contrast some things were outstanding; Nvidia support on FreeBSD is very, very good. Opera 9, as previously mentioned, is excellent; I believe it may be the fastest browser I’ve experienced. Kaffiene works well as a media player on this platform.

Yet there is an unfinished feeling about PC BSD, a lack of polish, an essence of a project in progress rather than a product delivered. It is, after all, on only version 1.2. Furthermore, I’d hazard a guess that there are relatively few developers working on it; hopefully this will change.

Also, I hope for more native FreeBSD software so that I can get a genuine idea of how well it compares to other OSes. In order to use some software like Realplayer, PC BSD users have to download a package containing Fedora Core Linux’s base.

Overall, it is a good start and a worthwhile experiment. For the moment, however, the PC BSD desktop is going to be switched Fedora Core 5.

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