Following three release candidates, the PC-BSD project developers have announced the release of version 8.2 of their BSD open source operating system for desktops. According to the developers, the second point update to PC-BSD 8.0 includes a variety of enhancements, improvements and new features over PC-BSD 8.1, which was released in mid-July of 2010.

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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump

Tried it, the installer is nice, but some apps have a tendency to crash, like e.g. Firefox. Apart from that, it looks nice. But it's a pain in the backside working with (old/unstable) PBIs and ports. And this Jail for ports is far from really usable. Finally PCBSD performs way slower on a dualcore Intel Atom with 2G of memory compared to Slackware/KDE4 on the same machine. Usually FreeBSD performs better than Linux on small machines, according to my experience.

I tried it under VirtualBox, after editing /usr/.../kdmrc to have the same DPI 75 as I have on my 'usual' desktop and tweaking the fonts and so and so it was quite usable, but I the problem in my case is that, that I do not need all that KDE stuff

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd

I don't like KDE at all, but sometimes I have to install some "usable" operating system for relatives, friends etc. Most of the time it's Ubuntu, sometimes I try PC-BSD, but it has too much teething problems. Alas, DesktopBSD was my favorite. Of course I'm biased as former member of the team, but it was just a plain FreeBSD pre-configured with some useful stuff. PC-BSD is a different case, it installs too much "layers" between the desktop and FreeBSD, similar to Mac OS.

I don't like KDE at all, but sometimes I have to install some "usable" operating system for relatives, friends etc. Most of the time it's Ubuntu, sometimes I try PC-BSD, but it has too much teething problems. Alas, DesktopBSD was my favorite. Of course I'm biased as former member of the team, but it was just a plain FreeBSD pre-configured with some useful stuff. PC-BSD is a different case, it installs too much "layers" between the desktop and FreeBSD, similar to Mac OS.

I have not tried PC-BSD for over three years. How usable is PC-BSD now if one sticks with ports? So how Flash, Java, Skype work on PC-BSD? What about printers and scanners out of box?

Another thing is that the HAL is at the end of the life so in reality FreeBSD doesn't have auto mount. Without it FreeBSD is not really more n00b friendly than OpenBSD. The death of the HAL is also validation of OpenBSD wisdom that OpenBSD should not follow current fashion.

What happen to the group of German developers who took over DesktopBSD? The forum is in German now so since I do not read German I have no idea if the thing is still alive.

Actually recently I had fairly extensive experience with OS X and I can attest that OS X with few changes could be a perfect n00b friendly BSD system (with the premium price tag). Apart of the poor keyboard on Macbook-pro (somebody has used to ThinkPads ) my main complains with OS X were:

Lack of PF. I am sorry but IPFW is definitely something that I refuse to use after long experience with PF. Ubutish way of creating root account (through sudo).
Bash as the default shell (even though Korn shell was the part of the base and could easily switch to it). I am not particular fan of HFS but I can see why Apple cancel the plans to switch to ZFS. Lack of transparent (at least to me) way to control file system mounts (lack of fstab file). Lack of the centralized configuration file for start up scripts (something like rc.conf.local and rc.local files on OpenBSD). De-installing software (with all libraries) is pain in the ass (at least the one which was not installed using MAC ports). I could not also find an easy way to make Cocoa window manager behave like Calm Window Manager. File manager was annoying.

However heaving full native support for my favorite (Opera) web-browser,
stupid M$ office formats, Flash, Java, Skype and all other spoils just a click a way was a pleasant experience.

Also for the first time I tried TeXShop and even though I am not planning to stop using vi for TeXing in near future I really liked native support for inverse/direct search.