PC-BSD is supposed to be a version of FreeBSD that is tailored for use as a Desktop OS. Some of my experiences so far:

1. Installation is excellent, and fast (20 mins). No need to have an internet connection, and not many questions in the installation. Everything worked with autodetection on the reboot of the installation, so this is all good.

2. Updates provided through an automated system (which works). This means the main applications that I use for desktop use (Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC) are all easily updatable. This is good because OSS moves very quick, and by the time any distribution standardises on a release, updates for half the software already exist. The downside is that there is still a reasonable amount of software that I use that is not in the PCBSD format, but I’m sure that will change as they get bigger and add more packages.

3. Bad printing support (for me). This is a BSD problem, not a PC-BSD problem, but ultimately it makes it a bit difficult to do “real” work on my PC – I can’t print it! I have a Samsung CLP-300 which has Linux drivers from the manufacturer. Additionally, the OSS world has support for it in the SPlix software package (Samsung Printer Language software). Unfortunately, the SPlix version in FreeBSD ports is horribly out of date – it hasn’t been updated since the end of 2007, and is still using version 1.x. Version 2.x is out. This wouldn’t be such a problem except that printing on the CLP-300 with the 1.x driver fails with the error: “Filter rastertospl2 for printer CLP300 not available: No such file or directory”. This is a known error in 1.x that was a problem for many Linux distributions, and they promptly updated it. FreeBSD, for some reason, has not.

4. Although everything worked out of the box, the graphics performance is sub-par. I have an ATI HD 2900XT, and ATI don’t produce FreeBSD drivers. nVidia do, but only 32 bit. So I guess I can’t use a video card in my computer. Oh well Seriously though, it works, but there is no 3D hardware acceleration in the open source drivers for the more recent cards. This means that all the OpenGL effects used by the fancy GUI desktop really put a strain on the CPU (30% of both my cores are being used JUST to draw graphics at the moment).

[Update, 16th June] 5. When you shutdown uncleanly (i.e. without actually initiating it from the desktop and waiting for it), upon reboot PCBSD makes you wait for the file system check. Also, it doesn’t actually tell you the status of the file system check! Linux Ext3 makes you wait as well, but at least it tells you thae status so you have an idea of how fast it is going / how long it has to go. Also, FreeBSD has the capability to background the file system checks (I have this set on some other actual FreeBSD test systems), so I don’t know why PCBSD chose to do this. Maybe just for safety…