Loving the FreeBSD

Johnson David DavidJohnson at Siemens.com
Wed Aug 20 10:22:29 PDT 2003


On Wednesday 20 August 2003 04:30 am, Jeandre du Toit wrote:

>           i would like you to keep you os of my front porch. if i see
> windows in or near my house again there will be trouble.

Hee hee!

I just built myself a new computer, and Windows is one of the OSs that 
will run on it. My first experience with Windows XP leaves me less than 
thrilled.

Formatting a 20Gig UFS2+Softupdates partition: less than five seconds. 
Versus. Formatting a 20Gig NTFS partition: ten minutes.

Installing FreeBSD 5.1: about ten minutes, with zero reboots. Versus. 
Installing Windows XP: 52 minutes, plus two reboots (fewer reboots than 
with 98 though!).

Security advisories: FreeBSD 5.1 none that affect my system. Versus. 
Windows XP + SP1 + about 40Megs of critical updates. I haven't even 
gotten around to the fixes for those two internet shattering worms that 
hit during the last two weeks.

Setting up a DVD player in FreeBSD: install MPlayer and everything just 
works. Versus. Setting up a DVD player in Windows XP: Try Windows Media 
Player 9.0. Media Player crashes. Try "demo" version of WinDVD. Doesn't 
work. Still haven't gotten DVD playback to work under Windows yet.

Yes, I need more technical savvy to use FreeBSD. But since I already 
have some small modicum of technical savvy, the choice for me is clear. 
The only thing keeping Windows around for me is a tiny handful of 
applications and the occasional game.

David


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