>From Pat Bond's comp-wonk dad:
Nobody ever developed a MAC-style GUI for it. It's too hard for most people to use. Also getting it to work across a broad range of processors, with different mixes of attached peripherals, often requires a lot of knowledge and experience. ------------------------
I forgot to mention that the GUI used in the FreeBSD version of Unix is called X-windows and it can be configured to look and feel like a Mac or a Win9x GUI or its own native X-terminal found on Sun workstations. See for details:
http://www.camb.opengroup.org/tech/desktop/x/
The best of the office style software suites I found is something called StarOffice 4.0. SO4 works faster than MSOffice and has more bells and whisles, and consequently eats up more system resources--so I keep it reduced to it's wordprocessor-spread sheet mode and don't use the e-mail, news reader, web browser, database, webpage layout-upload-animated gif, jpeg, java, blah, blah, blah parts at all.
I found I liked separate smaller software packages with isolated functions, files, directories. In SO4 since you work in the same GUI all the time, you can't tell the difference between a web page, a text document, or something you downloaded, except by reading the path and the name.
To the other points above. Yes, Unix works on different platforms (PC, Mac, Sun) and processors (386 through the latest Pentium) and loads emulations for nearby flavors of unix. So I load a combination of the Sun OS and Linux emulators since these are the most common. SO4 is actually a Linux application so it uses the Linux emulator instead of the native BSD unix system calls. On the other hand, yes it is mother to configure, setup and get running. It has taken me about three to five months. As to peripherals, the list of devices under the /dev directory is huge with everything from ancient teletype keyboards, non-latin character sets to the latest sound and scusi boards and grows longer every week. The way this works is you import a minimum file skeleton of every device (several hundred), then connect to the FreeBSD website, 'port' and then 'make' the device you need, which is automatically downloaded to you from the latest released version. This saves your system from storing all the available drivers--giving you only what you need. The same system is used for the software applications. You also can update your system including the kernel and latest code changes this way too. It takes about six hours to completely re-make your whole system--while it is still running! I haven't done this because it is waay too scary and too easy to screw up. But it is there for those who know how to use it.
Chuck Grimes