FreeBSD will save me, surely
I have been a Linux hobbyist for many years. I have installed many Linux distributions on dedicated machines or dual-booted with Windoze.
I have seen and been honoured to lay my hands on a Mac (OS X) and thought it was pretty, if a little flimsy. For a couple of years my main desktop OS of choice has been Ubuntu (for the last 6 months the Minty derived fork). Over the years I have been almost as frustrated with RedHat, SUSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu as I have been with the MS beast.
The trouble with Open Source is that there is no commercial motive to support it, on the part of hardware manufactures; why should they? The Open Source movement produces great software that runs a great deal of the world's modern communications and PCs but it is primarily driven by people who don't 'play' with computers. The volunteers and others who work on the Linux kernel, for example, want reliable security systems and databases and highly technical projects to work. They don't care about the frilly stuff most people use desktop PCs for.
Thus: Linux, Unix, Wine etc are always a half-year or many years behind because they can never support all the hardware that the commercial boys and girls can. Trying to persuade more hardware makers to cooperate is laudable but always ultimately doomed, if there's no profit in it. Unifying hardware standards so that manufacturers were compelled to make driver interfaces easy to implement would help but won't happen.
The current well documented miserable failings of MS's Vista are helping push a few more people to a Compiz enabled KDE/Gnome environment but only those willing to spend a lot of time and money making careful hardware choices aimed at a specific alternative to MS.
There are millions of people like me with hardware, at least three years old with no intention of replacing it until it breaks, that want to use it in a modern, secure and reliable software environment. We won't be buying Vista or its successor. So where does that leave me?
I have been using Linux Mint for about six months and everything worked straight out of the box (on a machine built by me for Linux) and it is still fine, if a little slower than it was on day one but:
I still can't unravel the mess that is local networking. Something always goes wrong and has on every version of Linux I have used. It is an arcane black art, which has never been fully documented in any easily accessible form, after years of searching. In addition to my minty desktop PC, I have a Windoze box solely for making full use of a high quality sound device and making full use of my printer and scanner. I also have a specially built box stuffed with storage that should be a file server, internet gateway and (just for fun) domain controller but I have never had them all talking to each other properly.
What am I going to do about it? Install FreeBSD. I have gone back to basics, recalling undergraduate days in front of a Unix workstation, and read extensively about the forthcoming 7 release of FreeBSD, which I did briefly install a couple of years ago on my underused server (version 5, I think). I am still reading the 1000 page 'Handbook' and am plowing through 'FreeBSD 6 unleashed' ready for the big day.
I have realised that relying on the Linux distribution makers or Microsoft to look after my welfare is folly. I have to take control and responsibility for my hardware by installing a system I will have to make an effort to understand. The time I take to do that will save me many headaches in the future, I hope! It will be no walk in the park but my reading so far assures me that it is not that hard, just short-term time consuming.
I will still have to keep my XP machine until a miracle happens but that is OK. My successfully set up server will help protect it from itself and the stupidity and carelessness of the Redmond ne'er-do-wells.
