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FreeBSD operating system adopted by Netflix for hosting, and what Linux needs to improve on.

An old computer running IBM DOS. Before Microsoft bought it.
An old computer running IBM DOS. Before Microsoft bought it.

The FreeBSD UNIX distribution has been adopted by Netflix as the operating system of choice for their streaming movies service. This does not mean that they will be adding code to the FreeBSD codebase, Netflix are planning to host their service on FreeBSD powered Apache servers. FreeBSD is a reliable and powerful server operating system, perfect for hosting your website and storing files with the advanced ZFS file-system. With the new Intel KMS support that is now available for FreeBSD the possibility of this UNIX operating system making it as a regular desktop operating system. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5MTc the Radeon or Nouveau KMS support yet, but things are looking up for this operating system after all. It is still lagging behind Linux, but at least it is receiving greater hardware support that will enhance the desktop experience. Using the VESA  driver in Xorg under FreeBSD is too painful, I tried out the PC-BSD 9 live disc with the VESA  fall-back driver, but I could not stand it. The Oracle Solaris UNIX distribution got the KMS and GEM  support last year, FreeBSD has finally caught up with the Oracle team. There are many problems with the Linux distributions out there as well, this thread contains many opinions on what could change: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?71481-What-Are-The-Biggest-Problems-With-Linux#post267425.

Linux is a worthwhile choice on the desktop, it is very secure and reliable, it does need a unified desktop environment that is the same across all Linux distributions. Of course you should be able to install other desktop environments if you wish, but the default desktop should not be the Unity Macintosh-alike desktop that is part of the buggy and disappointing Ubuntu 12.04 distribution release. There are so many bugs reported in this Linux distribution, Ubuntu 8.10 was a fine release; but after that the whole thing has gone downhill quickly. With Wireless not working, crashes and other embarrassing problems with the Ubuntu release, it looks like the Linux Mint 13 distribution will take even more share of the Linux desktop market. At least the Linux Mint distribution has the MATE desktop that can use Gnome 2 themes and the themes for GDM may be easily converted to work with the MDM login manager that Linux Mint 13 Maya uses. The sound systems on Linux need to be standardized; it is annoying that you can not easily record the Stereo Mix as you can on Windows when recording your screen to a video file. With Windows that is easy when you are using Fraps. Linux needs that. We have distributions that are shipping ALSA and Pulseaudio together and this makes connecting and recording from various devices hard sometimes.

OS2 Warp. A nice 32bit operating system from the olden days.
OS2 Warp. A nice 32bit operating system from the olden days.

Especially when you are using the V4 input on your video capture card to connect a Digital set top box and hear the sound. I tried to use VLC to access the video capture cards input and watch television, but the input select option was greyed out. But in Linux Mint 12, this was not the case. So I have to use Xawtv to watch the video input and un-mute the line-in audio input and listen to the television audio through ALSA, whilst all other sounds come through Pulseaudio using the HDMI output. That needs to be fixed. A single unified sound system like OSSV4 or just updating ALSA would be a good thing. Pulseaudio does support surround-sound setups, but it is hard to get a sub-woofer to work with it easily compared to Windows 7. The audio configuration on Windows 7 is annoying at first; but you do get things working in the end. The Ubuntu distribution is the one with all of the bugs though, with Wireless not working necessitating a re-boot to fix the problem and suspend not working. I always use the sudo pm-suspend command to put my machine to sleep, then you press the power button to wake it back up again. But with Linux Mint 13 it does work perfectly. Why would Canonical release such a buggy and unimpressive release of their supposedly flagship Linux distribution? Are they trying to turn people off Linux altogether? Here is a list of all the bugs in Ubuntu 12.04 so far… https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu. A lot of the problems are to do with the horrible Macintosh clone Unity desktop.

This is a nice alternative if you are running Ubuntu and you are sick of all the bugs: http://linuxmint.copahost.com/stable/13/linuxmint-13-mate-dvd-64bit.iso. Linux Mint has less problems than Ubuntu. You are better off running that instead of the Ubuntu distribution that is as buggy as Windows `98 and hardly a good advertisement for desktop Linux. Or Debian Stable, I have run that in the past. Computers in 1981 already had a workable GUI interface and mouse support, so what has happened now? The Xerox Star computer system from 1981 already had a good GUI interface, icons on the screen and mouse support, if that computer system had continued to evolve until today we would have incredible computers on our desktops, we seem to have gone backwards since Microsoft bought DOS from IBM and created MSDOS, then Windows 3.0. The Xerox Star system had a monitor that could display a document on the screen exactly as it would appear on the printed page.

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