seanlong.orgposted on: December 12, 2013
I've been meaning to write this post for awhile now, sorry for the fuzzy timeline.
So sometime around July/August of this year I set out to find the best Linux distribution. If my memory serves me right I think I started with Lubuntu, because it uses LXDE and is similar enought to Raspbian which I have installed on my Raspberry Pi's. Lubuntu was actually pretty good but I couldn't stop at the first install. Next I installed Manjaro running XFCE/KDE and was really liking it until an update went sour and hosed my system. Next came Kubuntu, which surprised me by being not all that good, ran into some issues (can't remember what) and bailed on it after a day or two. Then came Xubuntu which runs XFCE and was pretty good but ultimately kinda boring. Finally I installed Zorin, which is very comfortable and I have configured like the Ubuntu of old. At this point I stopped looking for new Linux distributions and came to the realization that I'm bored with Linux. I wanted an OS that had a tight community/underdog mentality like the good old BeOS days.
In the beginning of September the new podcast BSDNow started up on the Jupiter Broadcasting network. I listened to a few of the shows and got excited for some of the features that FreeBSD/PCBSD had (I hadn't installed a *BSD since the early 2000's and had not kept up). So I went and downloaded PCBSD 9.2 (PCBSD is a desktop specific version of FreeBSD) and installed it on my laptop Lenovo T420. The installer was nice, the defaults for KDE were sane and the PCBSD utilities were icing on the cake.
So what is the status now? I have been running PCBSD 9.2 (now 10.0) since mid to late September. I still have the Zorin partition installed and use that occasionally if I need to test something on Linux but other than that it's PCBSD full time. I'm having a blast exploring the layout and structure of FreeBSD and there are just enough things that don't quite work right out of the box that I get to tinker. I have been keeping notes of these tweaks and will be posting them here soon.
