A third option (I just thought of it): is to use mfsbsd.
Then you don't need to have the power of FreeBSD. Any generic GUI operating system is sufficient. Matter-of-fact, if you use a cloud-hosted office suite (both Microsoft and Google have excellent versions, the latter is free), then a ChromeBook is appropriate technology.
I am using plasma6-plasma on 14.3 latest on one machine. The kde control panel has a tick box for automount USB devices that does indeed automount USB devices.
Speak for yourself, thank you.
Exactly. I feel that this is what's most disturbing for a lot of folks here.
13 pagesAlain De Vos that holds for most desktops or window managers.
I remember there was a big fuss when PCBSD first came out, basically the same arguments, then Dru Lavigne took its (PCBSD's) side and most complaints stopped. (Even though I'm adding to it) I don't see how this thread has gone on for 12 pages. Maybe too many of us are bored.
What is disliked about PkgBase will only manifest itself after a couple of years after its too late (when people start ricing the package list of what constitutes base). This was clarified earlier on in this thread.
What if I told you that these things are potentially related? Less technical users *like* monstrosities. Making FreeBSD accessible may well consist of us now having to deal with this cruft more and more in forums, mailing lists and in the software itself.
I use
/Sysutils/AutomountA real purist
QED
I don't have a problem with this. Without the Berkeley folks & Bill Jolitz making BSD sources accessible to all, we'd have no open source *BSD. If opening up access was good then, it is good now. Reducing friction and making things easier for newbies doesn't mean the hordes will descend and destroy FreeBSD. As the userbase grows, you will have smaller percentage of people and at the same time a larger number of people writing software or otherwise helping FreeBSD. That is a good thing. Without the system evolving to accommodate the needs of new users, it will eventually wither away and die.
Yep, and I do like the automount feature.
You can always use the umount(8) to un-mount anything that's been auto-mounted. Oh, and KDE actually offers you buttons to mount/unmount the USB sticks. And, that doesn't stop you from using dd(1) or gpart(8) on command-line afterwards... Just less typing and trying to remember the correct flags. The option is definitely there, and there's no lock-in to use a specific method.
[OT]In my case automount works but I cannot unmount anything automounted - this happens on every DE I tried (the last three are GNOME-Cinnamon-KDE)[/OT]
In which case, I'd check to see if something is trying to access the auto-mounted USB stick - if Dolphin has an open folder there, or if VLC is running. Paying attention to that helped me solve the un-mounting issues I had.
I don't believe it's the case. USB devices are handled by automount in my case and I suspect DEs are not allowed to unmount if they were not the ones which actually mounted the devices (to be clear, kde control panel tick box is not checked here).
They certainly didn't open it up to non-technical users. It was not an easy process to get started back then.
It will be way too late by then. Its like road speed limits; decreasing them is easy, but putting them back up when its determined they have no effect is very hard. No-one dares sign the dotted line to do so. If PkgBase does end up becoming an inconsistent mess, you think this will be reverted? No, we will simply lose the concept of "base" and FreeBSD will just become more aligned with the issues with Linux as the traditional BSD guys (i.e many of the developers) move to one of the other projects.
To be fair, I wasn't really referring to KDE being provided by the installer as a problem. I was around in the old FreeBSD 6.x days after all. Though I am disappointed after almost a decade, KDE isn't actually in a better state to new users... (Wifi, accounts, disk management tools are either non-existant or (dangerously) broken). Frankly, it makes FreeBSD look crap because its a perpetual MVP of a working desktop.
Problem solved.
