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For full release versions, along with the full selection of CD, DVD and USB images, PC-BSD also offers ready to use VirtualBox and VMWare images

Chris’ notes:

Hardware:

HP Envy 17 – Wifi was not detected. Only the vesa video driver seemed to work.

VM: No major issue, video performance is not great.

If you consider yourself someone who likes to stay current on open source software releases, try out new betas, and upgrade right after release – PC-BSD is probably not for you.

I failed to find the KDE desktop compelling for me. A good enough implementation, but error pages in certain areas and a lack of anything particular interesting drove me to try the other desktops.

This is one, of two audiences I think PC-BSD could be great for. The first is Gnome 2 lovers. Gnome 2.32 ships with PC-BSD as an option, along with LXDE and XFCE. I tried them all, but Gnome 2 was the most fun. It really was a treat to set up the old workhorse the way I used to like it.

It also made me realize, the world has moved on and Gnome 2 is just not for me anymore.

However, if the work horse aspect is important to you – then you might be the second category of user I think PC-BSD is great for. The enterprise workstation.

FreeBSD is an awesomely cohesive and well built system, even as an outsider in a strange new land I can detect and appreciate the collective thought behind this operating system. On top of that, it’s stable, fast, and has one of the best file systems in the world for managing and protecting large sets of data.

The speed and utility of the Gnome 2 desktop is great, the XFCE setup would also work quite well in a workstation type setup.

Combine that with years of updates, iXsystem’s enterprise expertise and you could have a major contender in the workstation market.

All that said, if you want the latest version of HandBrake (PBI: 0.9.3 current: 0.9.8), PiTiVi ( PBI: 0.13.4 current: 0.15.2), or Chromium (PBI: 21.0 Current: 22.0) and so on, you’ll need to look else where.

Much of this can be alleviated by taking advantage of the FreeBSD ports tree, which PC-BSD makes it easy to setup with just a few clicked.

If wireless and 3D acceleration are important features for you, test the system first.

For users like myself, there are areas of the system that feel a bit unpolished. Perhaps the result of a small, but dedicated team. And despite the team’s amazing efforts, it still feels like the FreeBSD desktop market could be shrinking as the Linux game market heats up.