Re: The case for FreeBSD

On Tuesday 08 February 2005 03:23 am, Joel Dahl <joel_at_automatvapen.se> wrote:
> 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?
> (...)

I have to agree with PHK here. If this is an issue, chances are they aren't 
going to survive with FreeBSD for too long. It's probably better to weed 
those people out early. There's always SuSE and Mandrake.

OTOH, people have always taken these things on themselves if they feel the 
need. FreeSBIE is a good way to introduce new users to the OS. I haven't used 
it to install FreeBSD, but can it be done like Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc.? Maybe 
that's where the efforts should go.

- jt