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Re:FreeBSD 8.4 is now available by kunai on Friday June 07, 2013 @11:56AM (#5839642)
BSD is great, but if you're on a laptop, I have to say I can't recommend anything other than GNU+Linux. That is the only Unix-like system besides OS X I've run on my MacBook Air that has good power management. Everything works out of the box. Xubuntu is an excellent choice; the 13.04 release works flawlessly with all hardware and I easily get about 6+ hours of battery life out of a 1.5-year old Air.

I've tried OpenBSD on the same machine, and got decent power management with it. It's not as ubiquitous nor as supported in terms of a software perspective as FreeBSD (e.g., can't run some Linux binaries, etc.) but it's still a good choice if you want to stay away from GNU and the GPL.

Personally, I can't live without the GNU tools, so I've never switched.

Re:FreeBSD 8.4 is now available by GalacticDomin8r on Friday June 07, 2013 @02:04PM (#5840525)
FreeBSD works fine on my laptops, m610 and studio 1555. The 1555 is a win 7 dual boot. I did have to replace the crappy wifi nic in it though to something better and something FBSD would recognize.

> Personally, I can't live without the GNU tools, so I've never switched.

Do you mean a GNU userland or toolchain? FreeBSD definitely has GNU toolchain although the ones in base are being deprecated. Still available in ports though. And I'd take the BSD userland over the clusterF GNU's is any day.

Re:FreeBSD 8.4 is now available by kunai on Saturday June 08, 2013 @11:06AM (#5845051)
I meant both userland and toolchain. I like the BSD userland for its simplicity, but the GNU userland has a lot of features that BSD doesn't have. It's bigger, and some may say more bloated, but it works well and is fully-featured.
Re:FreeBSD 8.4 is now available by GalacticDomin8r on Monday June 10, 2013 @05:45PM (#5857383)
> GNU userland has a lot of features that BSD doesn't have.

Do you have an example of this or a lot of them?

> some may say more bloated

I'm not worried about "bloat". What I am worried about it lack of functionality. If BSD is lacking in that area, it should be easy to identify.