Do you use FreeBSD on metal as your daily driver? Which version? What DE or WM do you use? Do you run any other OS alongside or virtually?

Andrey Lanin said:
soon only they will remain :rolleyes:
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Don't be so negative. There are a lot of active threads in this Forum, and a lot of very useful ones. This one might not be brilliant, but it lets people talk about things they like, which is kind of nice and positive and innocuous in the great scheme of things and the universe. Much better than watching TikTok or binging on Netflix.
 

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DrJuanNadie said:
I insist because I'm curious and maybe you missed I asked before. What made your mind to be blown?
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I'm not trying to answer for rbranco but CDE is probably a lot lighter on resource usage than other things like KDE/Gnome. XLibre is cleaning up Xorg and trying to move it to the next gen.
So combined, likely a little faster, little lighter than other combinations.

There is a whole thread on CDE here:

garaksarr

Other Thread 'CDE Users Unite!'

Does anyone use CDE as their daily driver here? If so, why?
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DrJuanNadie said:
I insist because I'm curious and maybe you missed I asked before. What made your mind to be blown?
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It brings back very nice memories of the Sun Ultra 45 workstations we had at the university. Those UltraSPARC were 64-bits and it took some time for Linux to catch up in this particular area. CDE was the peak GUI experience for me and the color palette is very nice.

I have to allocate some time to manually configure it. I'm not used to do this since a very long time.
 
DrJuanNadie said:
I know almost nothing about CDE. What do you like about it? I'm curious.
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I've known CDE for decades, I used it professionally on Solaris, HP-UX and Tru64. I stopped using it about 20 years ago but this forum helped me getting back to it.

What do I like about it? First of all it makes me feel a couple decades younger, and this is not bad at all. Secondly, it's lean, fast and stable. It's not as polished and feature rich as gnome or KDE are but it's good enough for me.
 
Do you use FreeBSD on metal as your daily driver?
Yes since the end of 2015. Now it runs on my personal desktop and tiny thinkpad x390.

Which version?
stable/15

What DE or WM do you use?
i3 since 2018

Do you run any other OS alongside or virtually?
Nope, even my 8 years daughter has FreeBSD (mate) on her laptop.

Explain anything else you want about your system.
I tried to run Bluetooth on the laptop. I was able to detect and connect to the headphones (apparently) but failed in creating the virtual_oss.
 
AlfredoLlaquet said:
I'm curios about what makes you not update.
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FreeBSD 13.5-STABLE is the last version on which I can successfully compile SeaMonkey (aka Mozilla Suite aka Netscape Communicator) which is my mail client and web browser and has been since Windows NT 3.51. I have until April 2026 to either sort it on FreeBSD 14/15 or move to macOS at which time FreeBSD will still be used but only for my mail servers and web servers.
 
Do you use FreeBSD on metal as your daily driver?
At home (since 2009): Nextcloud Server, Fileserver, 2 HTPC, Firewall
Main job (since 2022): various mobile pentest boxes (FreeBSD as bhyve host)
Secondary job (since 1995): whole farm of FreeBSD servers for a small ISP

Which version?
Mainly 14.3, some stragglers on older versions. 15.0 on one box, still testing and old-school about x.0 versions of FreeBSD.

What DE or WM do you use?
Servers: None, TTY and ssh are king
Desktop: Mate

Do you run any other OS alongside or virtually?
Which one(s)?
On the pentest boxes as bhyve VMs, Kali Linux, Windows (Sharphound), Alma Linux
 
I am using 15.0 with pkg base. I use my DE Gershwin that is based on GNUstep along with an objective C based window manager I am fixing up. GNUstep itself does not need a window manager but the X11 apps do so I am working on decorating X11 apps with AppKit here to work towards making a seamless experience for non native apps. Though sometimes I connect to it from a Mac with xforwarding to make debugging easier.

I am also using it with NIS and NFS so I can have the same account and profile on all of my machines, and VMs. I like that FreeBSD still includes things like that in base which may be a become a bigger part of the network computing model for Gershwin when I get further with tooling to automate it for the rest of the world.

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malco_2001 said:
I am using 15.0 with pkg base. I use my DE Gershwin that is based on GNUstep along with an objective C based window manager I am fixing up. GNUstep itself does not need a window manager but the X11 apps do so I am working on decorating X11 apps with AppKit here to work towards making a seamless experience for non native apps. Though sometimes I connect to it from a Mac with xforwarding to make debugging easier.

I am also using it with NIS and NFS so I can have the same account and profile on all of my machines, and VMs. I like that FreeBSD still includes things like that in base which may be a become a bigger part of the network computing model for Gershwin when I get further with tooling to automate it for the rest of the world.
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I had to look up for most technical words to understand what you are talking about. It happens often to me in this forum, which makes me realize how little I know (it's a humbling experience that lasts only an instant—I forget it right away and I back at my usual state of believing I know a lot about everything).

Anyway, have fun with your project. Why did you start it? What's you ideal goal, if any?
 
I have switched to FreeBSD 16 -current on metal on Laptop and Desktop machines. to be able to test new features as they appear.
I usually run a SOLARIS 11.4 VirtualBox VM on them as that was my professional support role.
DE used is primarily KDE6/PLASMA6
I find that inorder to be able to build and install any Port in the /usr/ports tree without running into hardware limitations, a machine setup with
at least 6 cores , 32 GB ram and 16 GB swap is beneficial. IF not , Large packages like Chromium will not build.
 
I dual boot between FreeBSD 14.3 and Windows 2022, currently. For me, last 20+ years were dual booted BSD/NT main workstation.

There is (still) no reason to not run dual boot Windows if you are working on a real PC and not something slimmed down with single HDD like laptop. You don't have to buy it, there are still versions that kinda run normally without the spyware and intrusive stuff (if you think Win 2000 is a good OS, 2022 is the thing). The software ecosystem of Windows is still immense, and there is still a lot of free or supporting software that runs only on Windows.
 
Zare said:
There is (still) no reason to not run dual boot Windows if you are working on a real PC
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In my case, I don't use any software that works only on Windows, so I don't need to dual boot anymore (I still can, because I have Windows 11 and Siduction Linux also installed, but I just don't do it anymore). As for the autohotkey script that I still use on Windows 11, it's more practical to execute it in a VM because that way I can do other stuff on the FreeBSD host at the same time, i.e., a VM is integrated, while dual booting is not.
 
AlfredoLlaquet said:
Do you use FreeBSD on metal as your daily driver? Which version? What DE or WM do you use? Do you run any other OS alongside or virtually? Which one(s)? Why do you need the other OS(s)? Explain anything else you want about your system.

Me: Yes, I do. 15.0 as of today. KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland + Kronkhite tiling extension. I use a Windows 11 VM on VirtualBox for some automation stuff that I made using Autohotkey. I also use a bluetooth speaker via a dongle and two monitors.
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you beat me by a couple days for running Plasma 6 with Wayland on 15-RELEASE. Do you use packages or do you compile from scratch? I've used FreeBSD as my daily driver for a while, but unable to completely ditch Windows - some things like my awesome old Epson Perfection v21 scanner (incompatible with SANE, unfortunately) Teams and TurboTax only work there, so I kinda have to keep an old machine around for that. Other than that, anything I wanna do - it's easier to accomplish in FreeBSD anyway, the feature parity is there, and no silly license restrictions to worry about, only whether my metal is powerful enough.
 
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