can I create my own graphical interface to run on FreeBSD?

S

SuperuserRoot

some time ago I installed FreeBSD with GNOME but I was not satisfied with this graphical interface, and I also do not want to install KDE, I wanted to make my own interface, would that be possible? If possible, how could I do this?
 
Look in the x11-wm category for window managers.

Go to /usr/ports/x11-wm/, or use psearch -c x11-wm.

There's one written in C, where if you know C, you can compile it to do what you want.
 
SuperuserRoot said:
some time ago I installed FreeBSD with GNOME but I was not satisfied with this graphical interface, and I also do not want to install KDE, I wanted to make my own interface, would that be possible? If possible, how could I do this?
Click to expand...
Before you reinvent the wheel. Ask yourself what exactly it is that you’re missing from GNOME or KDE. You could probably mold either of the two to your liking. If not, I’d probably start with learning Qt and go from there. It’s not easy, however, and by the time you learn how much work is involved for one person; you’ll probably give up. I wouldn‘t bother with GTK; it’s a mess.

BSD is ripe for it’s own toolkit though, IMO.
 
This thread is probably a waste of time, but I'll try.
OP: try installing, patching and ricing x11-wm/dwm to your liking. Or try to do something like this with it:

lnnppis5xyi21.png


You'll learn a bit C and you'll get a bit into the mindset of how window managers work. And basically, when you customize your own DWM, you are creating your own graphical enviroment and you are free to do anything with it. The source code is nicely readable, the basic DWM is very simple, etc.
 
SuperuserRoot said:
some time ago I installed FreeBSD with GNOME but I was not satisfied with this graphical interface, and I also do not want to install KDE, I wanted to make my own interface, would that be possible? If possible, how could I do this?
Click to expand...
No, you can't do that alone. Yes, you can do that in a team. Consider to join the LxQt or Lumina projects?
 
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SuperuserRoot said:
some time ago I installed FreeBSD with GNOME but I was not satisfied with this graphical interface, and I also do not want to install KDE, I wanted to make my own interface, would that be possible? If possible, how could I do this?
Click to expand...
You have to make your own web rendering engine first. Don't worry, that's the easy part.??
 
Not to dissuade a first-time poster (how many caught my earlier Carl Sagan reference?) but it's certainly possible cause it's programming and the things needed to create one are at your fingertips. After all, the Gnome and KDE and others have done it. I once did it for a medical product in assembly language years ago but not anything along the lines of Gnome or even i3.

It's a fair bit of work but a lot of libraries are built into the system or readily available that you don't have to make everything from scratch but from scratch some things will need to be done. You just need to take the first step.
 
Some steps ;)

- Decide on an underlying UI toolkit
- Create a Window Manager (for X11 or other)
- Create lots of utilities
- Profit!

It isn't really a hard thing to do but it will take time, especially with small teams or single developers. Whilst this is still very possible, the current state of GUI toolkits is almost as crap as existing desktop environments. This means for a really nice desktop solution you will be writing your own widget toolkit and then the scope of the project basically explodes. Unfortunately this can't really be done in a staggered or iterative approach either.
 
goddess@blackhole:/usr/src % make -j 5 universe
--- upgrade_checks ---
--- universe_prologue ---
echo "--------------------------------------------------------------"
echo ">>> make universe started on Thu Nov 12 12:28:01 CET -6452"
echo "--------------------------------------------------------------"
[...]
 
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