Please check the links to DesktopBSD wiki and forum. They aren’t working. You have omitted ‘h’ out of ‘http’ in those links.

Thanks, mehul. Fixed. If you would like to further help on making the DesktopBSD description way better, consider visiting our Wiki at http://wiki.polishlinux.org/desktopbsd and edit the missing data.

For about the fifth time, I attempted to install DesktopBSD; this time the latest 1.7 release. I had tried previous installations with pre-1.6 releases, and even three 1.6 releases, all with mixed opinions. I have worked with Free-, Open-. and NetBSD, as well as PC_ and MidnightBSD, but I always looked at DesktopBSD as having exactly what I wanted in a BSD distribution: decent hardware detection (DesktopBSD 1.7 is out of the park on this one; no screen resolution problems (ditto); no nonsense ports access (ditto via portsnap); available packages, not necessarily default installs (ditto, ditto). DesktopBSD has all this, Internet utilities, and a great community to boot.

Where I greatly appreciate all the BSD distributions “communal” atmosphere, they all have their nuances. Most recently, I was working with OpenBSD 4.3 as a desktop and thoroughly enjoyed it: Theo and friends never cease to amaze. However, as I required more and more current application support, I opted for DesktopBSD over both Free- and PC-BSD. FreeBSD is always a favorite: I cut my teeth on Debian (in Linux) and FreeBSD (in Unix-like), so it’s nostalgic, but not necessarily current. I still have a FreeBSD 5.5 box in the office I use to manage basic tasks - an old soldier I truly treasure. PC-BSD wasn’t really a consideration due to installation issues, and the .pbi thing is just more to learn: portsnap recent released apps works for me, but I’m sure they are quite closely related.

In closing, I’d like to openly thank Daniel Seuffert and friends for their latest release: IMHO, never before has a BSD been so user friendly and easily tweaked. I have a fantastic up-and-running systemns with the latest everything, smoothly running on a Sun Ultra20 M2 (x64) box (albeit an x86 version.

Cheers to all!

scribe3s

In the last quarter of 2009, we bid adieu to to a fantastic desktop version of FreeBSD; DesktopBSD. Not only did it outshine PC-BSD in tems of offerings (being as close to FreeBSD as you could get without actually installing FreeBSD), but the speed was amazing! Complete access to ports, all of the applications in their “natural” state, not a .pbi, allowed one to feel as if they really were running a FreeBSD box. In actuality, you were, and the loss of this *FreeBSD offshoot leaves us, again, with PC-BSD, which hasn’t seemed to quite make the product you’d expect (especially after the nth release - they had more alpha releases for 8.0 than a Windows release!). Anyway, good luck to the DesktopBSD team; they may not have had a huge following, but those of us who used the system were dedicated and supportive. We’re now left to return to the parent OS or move to a Linux distro - neither a perfect solution, but much more intelligent move than to PC-BSD.