GUI for FreeBSD

Is there a recommended GUI desktop for FreeBSD?
FreeBSD supports many different desktop environments, including popular options like GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and MATE. There is no single recommended desktop environment, as the choice ultimately depends on personal preference and specific use cases.

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment that is known for being fast and efficient, while MATE is a fork of the classic GNOME 2 desktop environment that offers a traditional desktop experience.

Ultimately, the best desktop environment for FreeBSD depends on factors such as personal preference, hardware specs, and specific use cases. It may be worth trying out a few different options to see which one works best for you.

Personally I prefer MATE, but keep the KDE also installed.
 
Enlightenment is the best one for me but you can choose which do you prefer accordingly to your setting , look kde-lxqt encountered an issue under freeBSD 12.4 and maybe also with 13.1-Release , i tested wayland with wayfire and hiraki with Plasma-kde directly without display manager,also lxqt with sddm ,or enlightenment ,with gnome and kde like backend apps , all did it working fine until last update, it look yet has been reported an issue.Xfce is lightweight and very customizable perhaps feel free to decide accordingly to your needs...Good choice ;)
 
Is there a recommended GUI desktop for FreeBSD?
Just try a few and you will find what suits best! There are several web pages that give an impression of the looks. Some need more CPU power than others. The more 'eye candy' the more your machine uses for the desktop environment, although there are some exceptions.

You can try a few next to each other. Just make a few aliases to start one of the environments after boot (examples here: openbox and windowmaker)

Code:
box='startx /usr/local/bin/openbox'
wm='startx /usr/local/bin/wmaker'
 
I have had great success with x11-wm/xfce4. It’s boring and barebones at fresh install, but with tweaking and custom themes you can make it look and run (and I do emphasize run) beautifully. It took a few hours, but I was able to get the exact desktop environment I needed from it, running super fast on an old discarded Chromebox.
 
 
> Is there a recommended GUI desktop for FreeBSD?

UNIX systems by nature are not GUI systems. It's GUI will never be so optimized as on desktop systems where it is developed in the same project. More over, the complex GUI project is the harder for the community to handle it, thus more bugs. So choose your poison. For me, the less GUI you have, the better.
 
Is ok to have one like nextstep. I think Linux has that one. Or go to Bill Gates one.
 
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UNIX systems by nature are not GUI systems. It's GUI will never be so optimized as on desktop systems
What gui?


the complex GUI project is the harder for the community to handle it, thus more bugs.
Any gui developed elsewhere has little to do with it running on FreeBSD. If it uses standard system and function calls, it should run fine on FreeBSD as on any other system. The only potential problems are the interface between that program and FreeBSD where they may use incompatible calls but that *should* be a minority.
 
Any gui developed elsewhere has little to do with it running on FreeBSD. If it uses standard system and function calls, it should run fine on FreeBSD as on any other system. The only potential problems are the interface between that program and FreeBSD where they may use incompatible calls but that *should* be a minority.
There is a lot more involved in GUI to work smoothly then just syscall compatibility. Simply put you can't have a good GUI if it's just another system service running along apache webserver. That's not how it works. That's the reason Mac OS X and Android no only got rid of Xorg but changed scheduling, vm, ipc... Simple example. On FreeBSD OOM in case of memory overflow shoots random process, which may include GUI as it just another process.
 
My point was that the overall operation of a gui system is contained within itself. The only potential problems are interfacing with the OS. Any bugs within the desktop system have nothing to do with FreeBSD or any other operating system. The post I was responding to seemed to think that FreeBSD would be the problem when it's not.
 
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