Completely agree about the changing code part. I program in Ruby and I often wonder what I have broken whenever I change some code. (I know I am supposed to write a lot of tests, but it becomes a big chore to write tests for all the test conditions.)
By the way, I would not call Python one of the densest language by any means. It is one of the nice and straightforward languages to learn which is expressive as well.
You are lucky. For first 8 years of my software career, I did not know anything other than C-based languages (except Lisp). Haskell made me realize what 'real' computer science is.
Thank you. I tried it and could not get OpenJDK installed. Also, it did not detect my wireless card. FOr now, I have postponed using it on my netbook. I will try it again when it has more driver support.
PC-BSD is nice. But if you want to know how FreeBSD works, it is best to install it using the command line tools. For GUI-based systems akin to Ubuntu, there is not much difference between say Ubuntu and PC-BSD.
I am facing the exact same problem with Intel GPUs you mentioned. So, currently I am running my video driver in Vesa mode (just 800 x 600 resolution). But, I would still prefer to use an open-source Unix-based system than a proprietory one.
I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is. I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the FreeBSD kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.
I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is. I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.
Yes, Racket is probably one of the best languages out there. And the documentation for the core language and standard library is excellent (Racket guide and Racket reference). But I think the author is talking about the PlanetT.
It does not have drivers support as good as Linux. Though I found that most peripherals work as intended. The desktop/windows managers are the same as in Linux world - Gnome, KDE, Xfce and Lxde. Most softwares which work on linux will work on FreeBSD too like Python, Ruby, Java. On top of that, FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility. So, technically, you can run anything that runs on Linux. But, I found that google tools or gigantic packages like eclipse do not work on FreeBSD (or I don't know how to make them work). The best thing about FreeBSD is what is best about distros like Arch Linux. They have rolling release. So, you don't have to distupgrade every year and face some weird upgrade problems. Another thing is FreeBSD is much stable (like Debian), which has the same advantages and disadvantages. The cutting-edge stuff does not appear in FreeBSD ports/packages till it is thoroughly tested. Third advantage is FreeBSD is a whole Unix OS in contrast to Linux being a kernel. So, you don't have a lot of variety like in Linux world, which is again a good thing and a bad thing. Most sys admins have experience only in a debian or red-hat distro. So, it will be difficult to find somebody if you are using a distro like Gentoo or Arch or Slackware. In BSD world, there are only two server-based OSes - FreeBSD and OpenBSD, which are similar (at least not as different as debian and red-hat). Finally, FreeBSD is closer to its Unix-roots than Linux. I find that FreeBSD people believe that if you have good documentation, people will be comfortable with command line. Linux world is more about making it more newbie friendly with nice GUIs. (Hence the dominance of Ubuntu).
Fantastic! FreeBSD (along with NetBSD and OpenBSD) may be one of the most under-appreciated OSes out there. I hope one day it becomes the desktop OS of choice for developers.
Actually, it works flawlessly. At least, that's what I found out recently. I am using it on Arc Linux and FreeBSD systems. If something like flash software works on FreeBSD (which is more of a server system), it will surely work on any Linux. (And if something is available on relatively less popular linux distro like Arch Linux), I am sure it works on Ubuntu and Fedora.
Thanks for the link. I found that by default, gentoo enables a lot of drivers (and they are not enabled as modules, but as part of kernel). I just made sure that I select the drivers required for my eee pc. It would have taken a lot of time to deselect the default ones. But, I am wondering whether kernel in Gentoo is just as bloated as other distros because of that.
I didn't quite understand it. From your example, it looks like ORM layer knows about 'pages', which are in views. Isn't it against clean separation of concerns?
Thanks a lot for the pointers. I have been looking for a good java framework to learn. I will be more than happy to settle with this 90% you quoted. They look simple enough to understand in a couple of days without wrestling with tons of XML config files.
He is not comparing distros. He is just recommending to newcomers which distros to start with. But yes, I agree that the introduction is too basic first. Maybe, he just want newcomers to know the 'real distros' they should try out after knowing the basics.
There is no great mystery behind it. I am the one who posted both these articles. I am thinking of trying out another distro after trying (and loving) arch linux and Slackware seems like a good distro to try.
Yes, I hope it is temporary though. They dropped support for menu-driven installation script because of lack of contribution. Hope somebody steps up to the plate.
To be fair, the author does mention that people who are new are better off trying Ubuntu. And I found that Arch linux is a great distro to try and understand Linux in the process because of its excellent documentation. Currently, the arch linux lacks ncurses-based installer, but when this article was written, it was fairly easy to install arch.