In addition to this, FreeBSD /usr/doc is
a) not installed by default, and
b) is useless and thus worthless just because it cannot be accessed on a machine that yet needs to be configured. The hen-egg question.
Furthermore, as
Beastie7 said, the FreeBSD handbook only concentrates on the core.
Applications are not covered. But getting applications work is the real part of getting a computer work.
BTW, I doubt that Arch has considerably more users than FreeBSD.
What they do have, though, is more openness to willing co-workers and cooperators.
On FreeBSD the number of people who get actual write/commit permission in is very small.
This small circle of people decides what gets ignored and what gets cared about.
I have myself experienced the apparently sometimes very unwelcoming attitude against people who willingly offer their contributions.
There is
bug 192617 and a
proposed new port. It worked for me when I checked the status of things over the last year or so. Maybe a community initiative can help find someone to finish it and and many other patches which have stalled over the years when the original submitter lost interest and those like me who used them for a while didn't have enough motivation or skills to take them up.
Things like that are what annoys me most on FreeBSD.
Willing contributors supply solutions.
But those who have write/commit rights
just ignore the issues, for unknown reasons.
In the example
mcit mentioned, this is already going on for
seven (!) years.
(Edit: just saw another example thread,
a user asks for a patch/fix supplied by another user 12 years ago to be finally integrated.)
This way problems will be guaranteed to permanently stay unfixed, making the load of technological debt bigger and bigger.
If this underlying problem, the often-unwelcoming attitude against willing new contributors, cannot be improved, then the only way to get these issues solved might actually be joining a more open distro.
I feel I begin to understand why things like PC-BSD and GhostBSD were born out of pure necessity, just to have things work out-of-the-box.
I never thought I would try out GhostBSD, as I would prefer less fragmentation in the BSD world.
But maybe that could be
actually a solution, to get the notebook-and-desktop-use-related issues solved which are persistently being ignored by the FreeBSD team.
So I will download and install GhostBSD on a test notebook, just to see how easily it could be adapted to add a KDE configuration.