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Old 19th July 2012
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
bsdstudent
 
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: DaemonLand
Posts: 834
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Hi barti !
When I first came to learn about the BSDs , I learnt 3 'labels' :

OpenBSD : Security
NetBSD : Portability
FreeBSD : Usability

This was not adequate as far as I -a user- am concerned
Portability : both OpenBSD and NetBSD are portable to powerpc hardware but for my case OpenBSD was more successfully so ( easy install , working rum0, working X, etc) (maybe I'm not mistaken to think of portability as lame when not combined with ease)
Security : all of them are secure and security-focused .. with slight differences with OpenBSD as king.
Usability : What is it really ?
if it means desktop experience : OpenBSD+Gnome or Kde reaches the same usability summit of PcBSD .. why bother ?
if it means speed/responsiveness : it's rocking fast
if it means lots of software : it has enough for me and zen choice works (eg. graphics : gimp and inkscape are enough for me .. for html pages , august and bluefish , Libreoffice for ) I did't miss a particular matter-of-life-or-death software.
barti , what do YOU want ?
I used PcBSD last year .. it was an easy big N slow Kde4 , so bloated.that wasn't the usability I wanted.PBIs make it worse.
All in all, It's only you who can know what suits your needs.
As ocicat told you (concerning window managers) : why not try some yourself and discover most suitable? same applies to OS choice.If I were in your shoes, I'd keep my newly hacked OpenBSD desktop .. and install FreeBSD on another disk or use a FreeBSD-based livecd (PcBSD may be used as a live , freesbie .. although live cds partially fail to show real performance) .. yet the real challenge for us newbies is :
How to install the new OS + how to get X (desktop) working + software management
If we start before gathering enough information from official websites , we get lost halfway or after first reboot (lol)
(it happened to me when trying NetBSD eventhough the official guides are so great :-) )
So take your time to try & decide :-)
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