a view from afar

I'm a big fan of the FreeBSD operating system. It's fast, stable, secure, supports a wide range of hardware out of the box, and has - or will have soon - some really cool features

The actual purpose of this post is to advertise something I hadn't seen before, namely bsdstats...

BSDstats phones home with non-identifying information that helps track how many people are using BSD derivatives. PC-BSD is probably the most accurate as it comes pre-configured. (I can't remember off the top of my head whether it defaults to on or off in the installer - I have a feeling it's off.)

I'm hoping to see PC-BSD usage climb. It's the only open-source desktop operating system with a package manager that comes close to Mac OS X's application bundles (you can't really beat a process as simple as: copy to /Applications to install, move to Trash to uninstall). Its only real competitor I'm aware of is K/Ubuntu, which has a handful more users at this moment in time. Even my mum is on PC-BSD (representing up to 2.5% of the UK PC-BSD users!). Her 6-month old laptop might grind to a halt under Vista, but has no problems running KDE. I tell her "it's not Windows and not a Mac, but it's more like a Mac", and she's happy.

BSDstats is available in ports if you are using FreeBSD - PC-BSD comes with it OOTB.

In other news: FreeBSD 7 preview In cased you missed the most interesting link in the cloud above, Kris Kennaway prepared this excellent introduction to FreeBSD 7, including some incredible multi-core Postgres results.