I downloaded PCBSD 1.2 and installed it on my IBM T21 laptop which has a Pentium III 800MHz and 256MB RAM. The installation went very smoothly and took 30 minutes, starting with about 1 minute of me interacting with the installation program. The system comes up with KDE. I haven't used Konqueror (the KDE browser) for a while. So I pointed it to cnn.com to read Pinochet's obituary. Konqueror crashed and a little window opened telling me that Konqueror segfaulted. I wanted to see which 802.11 network I am currently leeching from, so I double-clicked on the the little button on the fake Windows taskbar on the bottom of the screen and opened the KDE Control Module and went to the section that deals with the wireless network interface. It couldn't display any information about my wireless card, what access point it is associated with, or what quality of signal I was getting.

PCBSD 1.2 is not stable and does not work correctly. Hopefully future versions will be better. The project aims to make a free operating system for dummies. I would be really happy if all of the dummies of the world switched to PCBSD, but they would have to be ultra-dummies to switch right now because PCBSD doesn't work.

It is really hard to write software for dummies. I have written a bunch of free software but all of it is intended for expert users. Expert users are easy because when something doesn't work perfectly, automatically, they know how to make small adjustments to get it to work.

I think that KDE is mostly a bunch of low-quality code with a cute, girly GUI. It would seem like a better idea to write code that works correctly than to write cute graphical interfaces. But perhaps the KDE authors are very wise and they know that their audience prefers cuteness over correct function.