[TUHS] Favorite unix design principles?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 04:28:26PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> If I could get the day-2-day
> applications that I need to work on FreeBSD, I suspect I would be there in
> a heartbeat.

I dunno about that.  I tried out FreeBSD a couple of years ago when
Netflix was flirting with me.  The installer hasn't seen any loving in
30 years it would seem.  The disk setup tool sucks just as bad as it
did back in 1988.

I remember when Linux was this bad in the .90ish releases.  A long time
ago.  Now their install is painless, it's every bit as good as Windows
and maybe better.  And it got that way fast, I remember doing an install
on some machine around 1998 or 1999, I didn't have a mouse plugged in,
no worries, you could just move around with the keyboard.   X11 came up
as part of the install, the entire install was graphical and seamless.

FreeBSD is stuck in the 1990's in terms of user interface.  They've done
some good stuff in the kernel but it's not an end user system, I'd argue
that the install is much worse than any of the Sun installers and I
started with BSD.