Parents: OpenBSD better than Linux Mandrake

[Ben Goren <ben@trumpetpower.com>]

Greetings, all.

A loooong  time ago, I  was able to scrounge  a Mac Plus  from the
Arizona  State  University  School  of Music  for  my  parents  to
use. Some time after that, they bought a Performa 6214. Some years
later they started  complaining enough about it being  slow that I
set them  up with  a hand-me-down  300 MHz  computer (there  was a
switch due  to hardware problems) running  Linux Mandrake. It took
them a bit to get used to the change, but they were happy.

Increasingly,   people   have   been   sending   them   multimedia
attachments,  or they've  wanted to  go to  Flash sites,  or other
sorts of  things like  that.  I've never  bothered much  with such
things, myself, and  I've never had a lot of  luck getting them to
work. Still,  Mandrake is  supposed to  be the  Linux distribution
best  suited to  multimedia,  so I  kept  plugging away. Every  so
often, I'd upgrade  (as in ``wipe and install a  new version of'')
Mandrake, hoping that would magically fix all their problems.

While I have  to give Mandrake a  lot of credit for  being a whole
heck  of a  lot  better than  Windows in  general,  it still  felt
unstable. My parents would complain of random hangs--not often, to
be sure--and programs that didn't  like to work unless they logged
out and back  in again. Many times, I'd have to  try to figure out
why, for  example, all sound  stopped working in my  mom's account
but not my dad's.

I finally  gave up.   A month or  two ago, I  wiped the  drive and
installed OpenBSD  3.0. They had  been using  KDE before,  and the
OpenBSD KDE ports were then complete.

As far  as I was concerned,  it was a giant  leap forward. No more
RPM hell! Easy  install and setup! No digging  for mystery servers
to disable!  My surprise has come from their reaction.

My parents  say that OpenBSD is  faster. Significantly, noticeably
so.  It's also more stable--no  surprise there--and the only thing
they're lacking that they had before  (as in, they had before that
actually  worked) is  Gimp-print  drivers for  their printer,  and
that's mostly (don't tell them) procrastination on my part.

Sound works, everywhere, all the  time, for both of them. They can
watch and  listen to the  Flash greeting cards our  relatives keep
sending them.  KOffice does a  passable job for them--certainly no
worse than it  did on Mandrake, and about as  well as Claris Works
on  the  Performa. The  Gimp  does everything  my  mom  needs  for
her  artwork. They bought  a  license for  Moneydance, which  does
everything the version of Quicken that came with the Performa did.

And it's faster. And doesn't crash.

Where did this myth come from that OpenBSD is slow?

I tell ya, once Mozilla and {Open,Star}Office are available, you'd
have to be  silly to suggest that Mandrake is  superior to OpenBSD
for general desktop use.

b&

P.S. Just  yesterday, I  switched my  workstation from  FreeBSD to
OpenBSD.  It sure  feels faster, but I haven't  really stressed it
yet. It's definitely  cleaner and more sane. There  are some minor
things I'm  missing--most notably  Mozilla--but I can't  see going
back. b&

--
Ben Goren
 mailto:ben@trumpetpower.com
 http://www.trumpetpower.com/
 icbm:33o25'37"N_111o57'32"W

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