Hi everyone. I have used Linux since Ubuntu 12.04. Lately I have noticed a gradual decline in that system and even seem to enjoy using Windows 10 more, so I have been looking at alternatives.
These are just some of my thoughts on the installer process and base system.
Copying the ISO very easy and many options available. Good start. The installer is very plain. However it is functional, unlike Red Hat's Anaconda which has crashed my system multiple times. Not quite as beautiful as Ubuntu's live installer, but perhaps less likely to crash than its command line installer (which I think is a fairer comparison given the base install is similar to a server install).
Selecting keyboard layout easy enough. The modular separation of optional components is great, as is the fact my hardware actually seems to be automatically detected (Debian's has choked on finding the cdrom or network interfaces multiple times). Partitioning easy enough with the default options selected. Fetching the distribution took a matter of minutes, significantly faster than the Debian apt-get, although I think that fetches the files from the network whereas this ISO already has them available and just does the extraction.
Setting the root password was a little confusing, if you make a mistake you kind of just have to type it in wrong twice.
Creating a user account was actually really easy.
Timezone setting was a little unintuitive. Many options and did not seem to detect daylight savings.
On the whole I found the process to be very pleasant, the system (particularly the file system) seems more consistent and the boot times are quicker than my Linux install was.
That installed a very quick but bare bones system that does not include a graphical display. Setting that up was also very easy, just pulling in pkg, which seems slightly slower than apt but comparatively fast compared to dnf on Fedora.
Some not so good things:
Multiple LLVM versions are required to build packages and ports. The current implementation leads to a polluted file system structure, I think a better solution would be a dedicated /usr/local/bin/llvm/version/ directory. I did think it would be more consistent to compile ports with the same compiler as the base but I understand there might be technical limitations to that.
The ports and packages system seems really dependent on pulling in a large number of unnecessary software, I understand the approach is generic in the case of packages but it does have a tendency to bring in Linux stuff like pulseaudio. That's really quite unfortunate. I don't know what the solution to that would be in large software projects like Firefox where you guys might not have much control over the source.
The base system seems to include references to Xorg, which confused me since Xorg is not included by default.
Some of the naming seems a little inconsistent. For example why is there a CC and Mail in /usr/bin? These look like links to c++ and mail, but why are these treated specially?
I noticed that svn has been replaced by git, but the svn tools remain in base. Are these being replaced?
On the whole I am really impressed with the project and the amount of work that has gone into it seems really quite remarkable given the lack of awareness of the system.
These are just some of my thoughts on the installer process and base system.
Copying the ISO very easy and many options available. Good start. The installer is very plain. However it is functional, unlike Red Hat's Anaconda which has crashed my system multiple times. Not quite as beautiful as Ubuntu's live installer, but perhaps less likely to crash than its command line installer (which I think is a fairer comparison given the base install is similar to a server install).
Selecting keyboard layout easy enough. The modular separation of optional components is great, as is the fact my hardware actually seems to be automatically detected (Debian's has choked on finding the cdrom or network interfaces multiple times). Partitioning easy enough with the default options selected. Fetching the distribution took a matter of minutes, significantly faster than the Debian apt-get, although I think that fetches the files from the network whereas this ISO already has them available and just does the extraction.
Setting the root password was a little confusing, if you make a mistake you kind of just have to type it in wrong twice.
Creating a user account was actually really easy.
Timezone setting was a little unintuitive. Many options and did not seem to detect daylight savings.
On the whole I found the process to be very pleasant, the system (particularly the file system) seems more consistent and the boot times are quicker than my Linux install was.
That installed a very quick but bare bones system that does not include a graphical display. Setting that up was also very easy, just pulling in pkg, which seems slightly slower than apt but comparatively fast compared to dnf on Fedora.
Some not so good things:
Multiple LLVM versions are required to build packages and ports. The current implementation leads to a polluted file system structure, I think a better solution would be a dedicated /usr/local/bin/llvm/version/ directory. I did think it would be more consistent to compile ports with the same compiler as the base but I understand there might be technical limitations to that.
The ports and packages system seems really dependent on pulling in a large number of unnecessary software, I understand the approach is generic in the case of packages but it does have a tendency to bring in Linux stuff like pulseaudio. That's really quite unfortunate. I don't know what the solution to that would be in large software projects like Firefox where you guys might not have much control over the source.
The base system seems to include references to Xorg, which confused me since Xorg is not included by default.
Some of the naming seems a little inconsistent. For example why is there a CC and Mail in /usr/bin? These look like links to c++ and mail, but why are these treated specially?
I noticed that svn has been replaced by git, but the svn tools remain in base. Are these being replaced?
On the whole I am really impressed with the project and the amount of work that has gone into it seems really quite remarkable given the lack of awareness of the system.