PC-BSD 1.5 - Becoming More Usable!

As I look at the new PC-BSD 1.5 (Edison), I cannot help but flashing back to the days when Linux desktop was not that mature as it is today. The PC-BSD project commenced 3 years ago with user-friendliness in mind. Since then, efforts have been put into making PC-BSD desktop operating system as usable as possible for casual desktop PC users. The challenge was pioneered by Kris Moore, the lead developer, and a few volunteers in bringing the open-sourced and BSD-licensed Unix-like FreeBSD (famed for being a very secure and stable server operating system) to the desktop of normal or casual PC users. Interestingly, this project was acquired by iXsystem, a leading provider of high-end hardware solution in October 2006. Having tried PC-BSD 1.4.1and having been a fan of the BSD daemon, I decided to review PC-BSD 1.5. So, I downloaded the 32-Bit version of PC-BSD 1.5 which is powered by the FreeBSD 6.3 Release and GPLed KDE 3.5.8, X.Org 7.3, Compiz 0.6.2, etc. It was officially released on 12th of March 2008.