Pushrod said:
I don't doubt that the project will likely not turn around and become less and less relevant. I work as a developer and most of my peers have no idea what a Free BSD is or what it does.
I was actually pretty shocked to see that FreeBSD does not have an official Twitter or Facebook page. Why not? Isn't there always talk about how we need to get FreeBSD more "out there" and "visible"? Isn't social networking one of the top ways of doing that right now?
Out-of-box usability is terrible, probably thanks to the licensing conflicts (things like sudo are not there by default), and the fact that even simple things like having a good, preconfigured shell for root and the users. The fact that we still have csh as the default, which NO ONE knows how to script with, is actually a big deal.
I think the problem with FreeBSD as a project is that they have always "kept it real". Instead of paying attention to what would make it more usable and approachable, they have stuck to their guns on stupid things like using csh while Linux can give a full, working desktop or server with a single (graphical) installer button click.
It does not make sense to make things difficult for beginners for the sake of customizability or for the benefit of skilled users. It should be the other way around: everything should work well enough on its own, and then the elite can do what they want with it from there.
I share only part of this view, in a general sense[1], but more from a hardware standpoint. Yearly I kludge through disk setups ( yesterday, a
boot0cfg wiped all the data on a backup disk somehow; a guided gpart setup failed with a somewhat terse error, but poking around in
/dev
I found usable labels with which to continue the re-pre
-fstab setup. (IMO maybe partially
solved were each EXAMPLE in the gpart (etc) man pages preceeded by a paragraph verbosely explaining
what the situation is with the disk, then an explanation after the example explaining what the new
situation is (again, verbosely) and explaining the meaning of errors one might encounter. However, it
sounds like something for a full-time paid FreeBSD developer. Similarly, a PDF flowchart to print
(1990 shareware style) for configurations (cups, cron, disklabel, gpt, mbr), but again, much more
time to implement than I suspect anyone has time for.
[1] Something lacking overall: a lack of time; what with new hardware protocols arriving from
elsewhere; etc etc.
....
Relevant? I don't see it as ever being less relevant than it is. Yesterday reviewing a microsoft
directory structure; and daily browsing a cutting-edge linux forum, I see those as far worse off than
FreeBSD (from a user's standpoint) (given a few years of experience in FreeBSD in the latter), if
one wishes to keep the same installation over a matter of many years and not just a few.