6 Jun
2022
6 Jun
'22
3:41 p.m.
On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 08:43:01AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
All of the major Linux distros have made this point and click painless
(and see my other post, they all work just fine without a mouse in a
point and click world). FreeBSD hasn't updated their install process
in decades. It is literally stepping back to the 4BSD era. Painless,
it ain't.
On Sun, Jun 5, 2022 at 10:36 PM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
RedHat, Ubuntu, any of the major distributions. Heck, Knoppix is fine.
Arch is an outlier, it's not trying to be easy to install for boomers.
I disagree about the BSDs being similar to Linux,
go partition a
disk with FreeBSD and then compare that to Linux. It's night and day.
The Linux stuff works and is obvious, the FreeBSD stuff only makes sense
if you have been using that forever, it's awful if you are a newbie.
But define "Linux" here. Do you mean RedHat, specifically? Because
with Arch, you've got to manually run `fdisk` or `gdisk` or whatever, and
add partitions in that tool, set their type manually, etc, then manually
create the filesystems, install the boot loader and configure it. The steps
aren't necessarily hard, but it is tedious. The FreeBSD installer, on the
other hand, does pretty much all of that for you. My point is that YMMV
widely between Linux distributions, which vary between extremes of,
"manually partition the disk" and "this graphical wizard does all the
nasty
stuff for you" and FreeBSD is somewhere between those two. Linux really
did just make stuff work.
Huh. I remember before GPT you had to manually create MBR partitions
and, if you wanted more than 3 or 4 (or whatever the number was...) you
had to go and explicity create an extended partition and then subdivide
that. With FreeBSD, you just created one MBR partition and then the
installer let you create filesystems within that using their pseudo-graphical
installer (pseudo- in the sense that it was all text-based, but at least it
was menu driven if that was your bag). I found whatever Linux distribution
I was installing at the time a lot more complex than FreeBSD, but I get
that individuals differ here.