Re: The case for FreeBSD

On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 19:53 +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> An X-based GUI would be worse - the installer size would grow about 50
> times and the minimum RAM requirements would grow several times.
> Given FreeBSDs target (servers) it's important the the installer run
> over a serial port.

This is maybe a good point, but is it really valid?  No-one is stopping
us from having two installers (with the exception of size), keep
sysinstall (for those who like/need it) as default, but also offer a
graphical installer as a second option, like this:

-------------------------------------
1.  Install FreeBSD  (text-mode)
2.  Install FreeBSD  (graphical-mode)
-------------------------------------

Why choose between X and Y, when we can have both?

All this comes down to one thing: we need to attract new users.  There's
always exceptions, but generally Mr.Hard.Core.Linux.User won't throw his
Linux installation away and switch to FreeBSD overnight, so we should
really focus more on new and curious users and show them what FreeBSD
has to offer.  BSD used to be about cutting edge development, and it
probably still is, but Joe Random User doesn't care about that - he
needs something that is easy to use, and easy to install.

At my university, students often ask me (well, they ask in Swedish, but
since people on this list probably classifies Swedish as a weird
language, I'll translate it ;-) :

S:  What's this FreeBSD I've been hearing about, is it any good?.
M:  Sure, it's great, it's powerful and it has all those great features
that you could expect (and I go on about how great it is).

The second question usually is:

S:  Ok, nice!  How's the installer, is it as simple as Ubuntu Linux?
M:  Uhm, well, it's text-mode only.
S:  Ugh!  Why?  Doesn't FreeBSD run on new hardware or what?
(...)

And you should quickly see where this is heading.  My point is, as long
as we keep on preaching about sysinstall's greatness, we won't get new
users.  They have a bunch of other options to choose from (yea, about a
million Linux distributions), so why should they pick FreeBSD?

I'm advocating FreeBSD in Sweden, and I see a steadily growing amount of
users, but something is stopping us from taking that big step that would
place us at #1 position.  I think that Poul-Henning made a very good
summary of what needs to be done back in December:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-December/043849.html

I love FreeBSD, and I will probably use it as my primary OS until I die,
and I would really hate to see it end up in a dark corner somewhere in
the future.

Sorry for any bad spelling, I think I broke some kind of world record
typing this mail... ;-)

--
Joel