I installed FreeBSD 5.3 today.

Hmm…..
Not sure what I think about it. I like the startup script better than in 4.x, but I found some things that I really didn’t like.

The installed seemed to go fine, and was very similar to that of 4.x. After the install I went about installing some of the things that I normally install ie
pkg_add -r wget
pkg_add -r bash
etc…..

I decided to try sysinstall to see if that still worked the same way, so I tried to install blackbox, boxtools, and bbconf.
The first two installed fine, but bbconf freaked out and stated that it couldn’t install cups, and qt-something.

I then decided to try it with ports. I went into /usr/ports/x11-wm/bbconf and tried make
30 minutes later it was finished????? wtf? This took about 3 minutes on 4.x. Why so slow?

It could be that I didn’t install correctly, and haven’t tuned the OS to the hardware that I am on, a single 733Mhz Intel but, I never had this slow of a compile on 4.x straight out of the box.

I have read some info stating that changes have been made for the advancement of SMP at the cost of single processor machines. I don’t know how true this is, but I ran across Dragonfly BSD which seems to be a fork of 4.x. They seemed to disagree with the direction FreeBSD was heading with 5.x. I would like to give it a try, but it seems to be a little rough around the edges right now.

For me, right now, I think I will stick with 4.x for a while, and play with 5.x to see if it will grow on me.