A Look Ahead

Copyright © 1999 Brett Taylor

After a long hiatus, I'll be making my return to the DesktopBSD column next month. Wes Peters' article talks a lot about how good the BSDs are as desktop machines. I wholly agree with him, but I think that a lot of this applies to solely to people who are used to operating in a Unix environment.

The Gnome and KDE groups have been striving to provide all the desktop ease and functionality that a person used to working at their Microsoft desktop. In general I think they've done a pretty good job at getting applications made.

One area that new users desperately need help with is in administrating their machine. I'll personally be looking at two new packages designed for FreeBSD that are meant to ease the new users' early administration experience. I'll review both of these in next month's issue.

Dæmon News is also going to be reviewing a number of other applications designed for desktop use in the future months. Many of these reviews may appear in future DesktopBSD columns or a new regular column may be created to handle them. If you have ideas for applications you'd like to see reviewed please send me an email.

Finally I'd like to thank the hard work of Geoff Jukema and Jonathan Chen who are now associate editors. Their work has greatly eased the burden that Chris and I had been bearing alone. Although they're hidden behind the scenes they are incredibly important. I'd also like to thank Louis Bertrand for his work in editing the news section.

Have a great month and I'll see you next month in DesktopBSD!

Brett Taylor, brett@daemonnews.org