That was a weird article. Compares specific BSD install experiences (FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE, NetBSD 9.2, DragonFly BSD 6.2.1_REL and OpenBSD 7.1.) without explictly comparing them.<p><i>"One of the installers...", "One of the package installation tools...", "There's an installer which uses its own color scheme...", "One system said I could only have an 8 character username".</i> ...and so on.<p>A lot of effort seemed to go into obfuscating which was which? What's the point of the article then?<p>She may as well have just said, "My other O/S install experiences have meant I can no longer tolerate the *BSD install experience after having given these particular ones a go".
> One of the installers offered a nice "auto" disk setup system, and then promptly sliced up the disk space a bunch of different ways. Everything was fine until maybe 30 minutes later when it was time to install GNU Radio. It was just trucking along until... it ran out of disk space. What happened? The path for ports was given its own filesystem for some reason, and it was 4 GB.<p>This is what ended my experience with freebsd ~20 years ago. I had a system that had freebsd (4.1?). I had used the automatic partitioning during the initial install. Later, when trying to upgrade it, / or /boot filled up, breaking the system.
.pc files are indeed a pain. Because BSD is and always has been bMake not gMake the whole gnu planet of "I tested deps and link library paths for you" thing is just different.<p>Imagine walking into x11 pre xorg config files, or cakefiles but only half-baked.<p>Disks are odd. You would think by now we would have unified on gpt and uefi but it's a long road.