DesktopBSD – Unix for the masses

Reptiler reports:

Currently I’m playing around with DesktopBSD. This actually is because I’m anyway playing with Xen, so I decided to use the time I spend on Xen to try out a few more systems. One of those is DesktopBSD, a version of FreeBSD customized for desktop-use. Thus it offers what we are used to from many Linux-distros today, ease of use and installation, automatic hardware-detection and -setup, KDE, a nice package-manager etc.
By the way, I’m not using the latest version, which is 1.6. The version I use is 1.6RC2, just because I had the image on DVD anyway. But I guess it’s recent enough for this.

As said, DesktopBSD is based on FreeBSD, which becomes quite obvious when updating packages, because those come directly from the FreeBSD-mirrors.

One thing I personally really like is the function to check the installed software for security-holes. This is simply done by comparing the list of installed software with one (or more, I don’t know the internals of those function yet) of those websites where they keep track of that kind of information. The gathered information then can be seen in the package-manager, which I think is a really nice function.

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Overall DesktopBSD leaves a good impression after the first few tests. For those who always wanted to try BSD this might be an option worth considering.

Read the whole article on Nuxified.org