PC-BSD - BSD for Desktop User : Review

The Open Source Portal has published a review of PC-BSD, a FreeBSD based BSD distribution geared towards a simple, easy to use desktop operating system. PC-BSD features Lumina Desktop, a lightweight desktop environment written in C++/Qt5 which does not consume a lot of system resources.


When my journey into the world of open source began in the mid-90s, the easiest way to get installation media was to buy CD sets from online stores and have them shipped to you. Being interested in experimenting with different operating systems, I always bought the giant bundle that included all the distributions. Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, SUSE, and several now defunct distributions were include for me to play with, but the bundles also came with installation discs for the various BSD distributions (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and later, OpenBSD).

To be clear, the BSDs are not Linux distributions. They are Unix-like, so they are similar to Linux, but they are their own family of open source operating systems with their own rich history. Unlike Linux with its multitude of distributions, the BSD family is much smaller; the big three distributions are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The small handful of other BSD distributions branch off from one of those projects, most frequency, from FreeBSD.

Read complete review in Open Source portal.

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