freebsd desktop

[max21]

I understand. It takes years to get to know FreeBSD. I thought about it for 20 years and I dived in (landing on my a**) about 10 years ago. It took millions of minds to biuld it. I been to hell and back, now I got a clue.

He don’t change much, even for us, because he knows he's a oldy but goodie. Anyway, if you still love Windows-XP as I do, just put it in a VM with FreeBSD as host. FreeBSD with PF will be his best friend ever. If you love Fedora-12, (the only one that was as fast as XP) well it don’t work anymore. It had a trick in it (mbr/hdd smarts) to keep it from running as a virtual machine inside Virtualbox and more. It ran Gnome-2 and all apts faster then a bat-out-of-hell and XP.

Other than those few, the desktop been dying ever since (but the youngest will never know it). The owners decided the next generation of power users will only be using webtop, that function like a smart-phones or tablets. Now you to got to hit 6 buttons or make many swipes to do what you use to do with a single click. Now you have to drill down into the system for every single thing you need to do. And to think people got the nerve to complain about FreeBSD mate-desktop functionally. It is BETTER than that, and you can build upon it. But not Gnome-3 or Windows. Anyway, the fact was they knew that the Webtop will dominate the entire industry and XP or Fedora types can’t do the job. That why you now have Gnome-3 and Winodows-10. They are ready for action, but they are a soooooo boring. But the youngsters will think it’s a gift. But FreeBSD has all of that already, a taste of boring with PF to boot. If some one is trying, I bet it be better than android. With 50 – 100 true GB per second coming to all, FreeBSD is already build for the webtop plus with real jails running every type of server one could imagine. It only goes to prove, no tech can do it all, but at least FreeBSD comes closers then all the rest … all for FREE, forever. That is why we must donate whatever and whenever we can. BTW: How much is a Windows Server License per year these days? Do it still come with unknown-tracker to keep an eye on it users? Do it do it better then systemd?

Smart business people plans for the next generation (). The best was full of common-sense, and that will/has been taken away until quantum change it back.

... and that's a fact!

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I once read a quote by some Einstein-ish type person who said something along the lines of "Science never changes. If you base what you do on the science, you're set for life." Or was it fundamentals of science? Or it changes slowly. Don't recall. It's why I chose FreeBSD. For those values.

 

[Sensucht94]

If you read my earlier post, you would have seen I also say "and serious amateurs". The rest of your post is only things I agree with and often say myself so we are in agreement on everything.

Drhowarddrfine, to be honest, I hadn't missed that line, however I wasn't sure about the extent to which your 'serious amateurs' definition would include common users. Since it wasn't the first time you were arguing on that topic, I simply whished you would explain and clarify your point of view, which is what you've done.
Now I can understand your opinion, and guess I mostly share it too

To an extent, I would hope so. Already I have seen an influx of Linux people, for many reasons, who want FreeBSD to behave just like Linux and be the next XBox. What I would hope for, instead, is more of those professionals with the time and energy to contribute to FreeBSD to join the developers and make it better.

Really, like you, I would never hope FreeBSD to behave like Linux, otherwise I would be using Linux at the moment, instead I'm writing this from BSD.
Linux has indeed its own pros, and that's why I kept it in a couple of computers, but, long story short we all know why we prefer BSD most of times.

If BSD's community would start being like Linux's, I would be really disappointed. I cannot stand as well people who install a less common system just to appear 'alternative' or 'cool', then,later on, they sign up on the forum before ever opening the handbook/instructions/wiki, just in order to bash it, expecting it to behave like windows.
The result always consists a of the forum and/or the IRC channel becoming as futile and stupid as yahoo answers. This is an issue that affects all Linux distros, and fortunately FreeBSD's community (one of the reason which I like that system best for) still resists and has not given in that bad influence, thanks to all the 'professionals' and the 'serious amateurs' you mentioned.

However I really wish there would be a way to make FreeBSD spread wider, without changing it or ruining its oasis of peace.
Consequently, I hope more people (especially more 'common users' like me) to start appreciating BSD the way it is; this purpose still induce me to talk about FreeBSD to some people (practically only Linux/OS X users*** who seem to be 'professionals' or 'serious/intermediate amateurs) during free time, to talk over about its features, how it is and works, and to help them correctly configure a working desktop envronment.
Similarly, I really hate sometimes when a newcomer makes a clearly 'noob-like question' and he's critized and made fun of because of that. Sometimes they just post unproductive threads, but in other occasion it's clear they're sincerely asking for help and did that the wrong way.
In those cases I suggest we should help them and be patient, as they're beginners, not answer them in a cold, annoyed manner.

To sum up, we agree about everything , like you said, I just wanted you to be more clear, and perhaps I've been far too impolite replying you the first time

***I do not know much about Windows NT, bu in my experience I discoverd that Windows users are the least interested in something like BSD

The reason reason I mention all this is because coming from DOS, and as an amateur, FreeBSD feels very comfortable.

Yeah, it's really strange, as we're comparing Unix to Microsoft's systems.

However the freedom you get when you use FreeBSD, the simplicity of tuning with configuration files and fixing problems, the transparency of an OS that puts everything under your very eyes, really resembles DOS'.

Nothing feels like DOS as FreeBSD, despite all the differences and the fact BSD is a modern,up to date OS.

Still, in spite of that, you will probably agree when I say that those rc.conf and loader.conf really remind me somehow of the old but gold autoexec.bat and config.sys, and provide nowadays the same sensation of safety and, at the same time, freedom, the latter couple used to give us.

The tutorial I wrote targets that minority, however small as it might be, and tedious for experienced users to read through:

Beginners Guide - How To Set Up A FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch

Just given a look at it, nice job, really

It's a given that as TrueOS becomes more popular there will be an influx of people who want to try vanilla FreeBSD (PC-BSD is how I got here), that in the end will find Linux, or even Windows, preferable and decide to go back to it after some discord in the forums. Think of it as the growth pains that we as its users experience as FreeBSD grows.

On the other end of the spectrum lies stagnancy. How many times in the last few weeks have you read where someone said that FreeBSD is behind Linux in some form or fashion? I can point you to a few, one as recently as yesterday. But no matter what, it is never going to be for everybody nor should it try to be.

When you stop to think about it the analogy of the Red Pill and the Blue Pill isn't that far off.

Trihexagonal thanks for your reply. As always your answer provide useful info, an interesting and intuitive reflection, nice tips and a source to start from when opening new threads. I take my chance now to thank you for all your effort as you did with DutchDaemon.

The pills analogy of Matrix suits FreeBSD amazingly well. I wouldn't be able of thinking of a better metaphor. And yes, as I said to drhowarddrfine above, I understand too that the red pill is not for everyone

 

[Jeckt]

I know one of the biggest reasons Plasma isn't ported is because it is heavily dependent on systemd

My main desktop system is Gentoo without systemd, and it runs plasma 5 fine (or at least is as buggy as it always was). Due to the very small minority of non systemd Linux distros these days, I doubt they wrote an entire shim layer themselves. I'm sure it's littered with Linuxisms all over the place, but I don't think systemd is a show stopper.