alright, i couldn't help it any longer -- my curiosity got the better of me -- i installed FreeBSD on my PC! ok so richard did it first on his PC at the office, alright, maybe that had something to do with it. but its just that i helped him find useful articles on FreeBSD and besides helping him out, i kind of found myself liking the design philosophy of FreeBSD myself!
i'm not going to go into all the gory details of my installation. suffice to say i have it running at home, and i'm getting the hang of this "ports" thing. i've managed to get gnome up and running, i've got mozilla, i've got xmms, i've even got the java JDK compiling right now! naturally this thing already has gcc in it, so i've practically got everything i need in a workstation! and once the jdk's compiled, i'll be able to install OpenOffice as well! sweet!
impressions thus far: GNOME runs so much better than it does on linux, for one! its so... so... crisp! and snappy! faster and a lot more responsive than in my previous fedora installation! i guess this might be due to the fact that everything's compiled from source and so the executable binary is tailor-made for my specific system...
i also don't get that much of a performance hit when i'm compiling really large sources. when i compile a fairly large project, like our softswitch, the act of compiling takes so much resources that everything very visibly slows down. if you need to do any actual work that requires tapping on your keyboard, then you're basically screwed; about the only thing you can do is point and click and wait patiently for the web page to be displayed. on FreeBSD though, while compiling i'm also posting to this blog, and i'm also listening to MP3s! and nothing's choppy!
so, then... i'm very happy with my new Beastie-infested PC! does this mean i'm letting go of Linux? its too early to tell. i'll probably post about it all as i go along....
Posted by lone_geek
at 5:25 PM WST
Updated: Monday, 2 February 2004 12:20 PM WST