LinuxWorld 2006: PC-BSD
Let's be honest here: BSD is incredibly powerful, stable, and secure, but it's never been the first OS that enters folks' minds when you utter the word "desktop." There are some new ideas in the BSD world, however, and the people behind those new ideas are trying hard to expand BSD to more desktops. At LinuxWorld, the evidence for that is PC-BSD, a version of BSD designed to be easy to install and use. Utilizing a graphical installer based on the slick QT (the same toolkit used by the KDE desktop environment), this is about the most desktop-friendly release of BSD I've ever seen. Even the software installer is easy to use; in fact, it's quite Windows-like. Simply click on the app you want to install and a wizard opens up that looks 'n feels exactly like the typical Windows installer we've all used a gazillion times. Heck, there's even an uninstaller that's just as easy! What the heck is happening to BSD? Have aliens taken over the bodies of BSD developers? An easy-to-use desktop BSD? What will they think of next?
(I gotta tell you guys this one, though: there's still signs of the good ol' BSD attitude at LinuxWorld. When I asked a very knowledgeable and cool dude at the FreeBSD booth about these new efforts to get more folks using BSD, he jokingly said, "Actually, we don't give a f*** if you run BSD, we just want to make the best server OS out there." He quickly followed that up by saying that the new FreeBSD marketing team, about one year old, in fact does care quite a bit about users. But it's good to see signs of the old Unix 'tude still present and accounted for.)
