Reply to post: "user friendly"

FreeBSD 10.3 lands

MacroRodent
Linux

"user friendly"

It is the little things. Just because BSD (and Linux) did something in a certain way 20 years ago is no reason to keep doing it that way on 2016. Not everything in Ye Olde Unix was perfect.

As I wrote in some earlier post, I (a daily Linux user at work) occasionally peek into BSD to see where it is going. Every time it feels like a time warp. Last week-end it was NetBSD 7.0. Probably the purest maintained BSD version you can get these days.I really liked the way it fast to install and boot up (in a VirtualBox VM). But whoever created its installer though it OK to forget what keyboard layout I requested (Finnish in this case) when the actual OS started. Something most Linux distros started getting right by year 2000. I also asked the installer to install X11 and set up xdm, which it dutifully did, but logging into X11 went nowhere until I rebooted in single-user mode and created a rudimentary .xstartup for root. Then I got in, got an xterm window, and was surprised command-line editing and completion did not work, even though both did work in the plain text console. Seems this depends on some environment variables that do not get set by default in xterms.

And so on, I expect, if I keep configuring and using it (I might just be masochistic enough to do so). Having fixed basic usability does not make Linux a Windows clone. Just a Unix-style OS that can be approached by other people besides old Unix greybeards

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