How good is FreeBSD for desktop use

A

asifnaz

I am looking for a stable OS for desktop use. I am doing that for an old PC PIII 1 ghz and 256 ram, So I think PCBSD is not an option.

I use my desktop for simple word processing, music, videos and browsing etc .

Need your advice.

Thanks.
 
I used FreeBSD on that kind of machines (even AMD K6-2 500MHz with 192 MB RAM) with Fluxbox/Opera/Thunar/OpenOffice and it worked quite good.
 
It's very good. And its stability is on the top in my opinion.

For word processing you can use Open/LibreOffice or an old Microsoft Office (e.g. 2000/2003) through WINE, as the former can be quite heavy.
There are many multimedia players. I personally use mplayer and never need anything else. It's very lightweight and plays everything I throw it.
All web browsers are available (Firefox, Opera, etc.), including all the very high-quality text-mode browsers, elinks being my favorite because it has tabs among other useful features.

One of the machines I own is an old 333 Mhz Celeron with a 128 MB memory. I stay away from all desktop environments (obviously) and use lightweight window managers (e.g. fvwm) and applications. Actually I do that even on more powerful machines.
 
Thank you for you replies. I will definately give it a try. What desktop it uses as default btw (gnome OR kde etc).
 
asifnaz said:
thank you for you replies . I will defiantly give it a try . what desktop it uses as default btw (gnome OR kde etc)
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It doesn't have a default desktop environment. If you want a FreeBSD variant that comes with a desktop environment installed by default, then you might want to try PCBSD instead, which uses KDE.
 
Minimal setup or not, FreeBSD itself remains "CLI only". ;) The minimal setup is a base and kernel and the full setup is a base and kernel, full sources, a few extras for developers, documentation and "games". X magic comes from the outside (port/packages).
 
Beastie said:
Minimal setup or not, FreeBSD itself remains "CLI only". ;) The minimal setup is a base and kernel and the full setup is a base and kernel, full sources, a few extras for developers, documentation and "games".
Click to expand...

Indeed.
 
Beastie said:
Minimal setup or not, FreeBSD itself remains "CLI only". ;) The minimal setup is a base and kernel and the full setup is a base and kernel, full sources, a few extras for developers, documentation and "games". X magic comes from the outside (port/packages).
Click to expand...

Well I am fairly good with Linux CLI but I have no idea about BSD yet. I will really appreciate if you could tell/give link where I can learn commands to install basic stuff.

After that I will definately return to the community.
 
hopspitfire said:
I would recommend avoiding firefox and using Epiphany for much better stability in your DE.
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Why not to recommend lynx....?
Epiphany is a toy, that use Firefox in core (geko engine). What's the point in using it anyway?
 
Better use Midori instead of Epiphany/Firefox (or generally Gecko engine browsers), but Midori is in deep developing progress and sometimes not stable, but its the first browser I would use if I would not have Opera.
 
vermaden said:
Better use Midori instead of Epiphany/Firefox (or generally Gecko engine browsers), but Midori is in deep developing progress and sometimes not stable, but its the first browser I would use if I would not have Opera.
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Ok, I know, Firefox 3.6.13 and 3.6 in general is not da best Firefox around, then it pretty much run ok on any of my environments. So I'm just asking, why, oh why, not on my Freebsd and also PCBSD boxes? Even in PCBSD sometimes is sluggish, it stops on load, it do not support java. Whats wrong with Firefox 3.6.x and the BSD world? I do run Opera and sometimes the Chrome port, even better compared to Firefox, even if not completely stable, IMHO.
 
@piggy

I have used Firefox for long time ... till I 'met' Opera, then I 'met' the browser by big 'B' and I do not use any other browser, I also have Firefox installed just in case, for example works better with Exchange OWA mail interface, but for REAL 'browsing the net' Opera is just great.

I have tried various extension, mouse gestures extensions and so, and I must say that they all suck, same to Chrome if it comes to gestures.

Opera introduced extensions in 11.x and guess what, I did not even bothered to check them, because everything is there already ;)

There was time when Firefox was better for some purposes, like for example because it has Firebug, but now as Opera has Dragonfly, its pointless to use Firefox only for that reason.
 
vermaden said:
There was time when Firefox was better for some purposes, like for example because it has Firebug, but now as Opera has Dragonfly, its pointless to use Firefox only for that reason.
Click to expand...

When you turn off JavaScript Firefox Firebug still works, while Operas Dragonfly obey to fact that JavaScript is disabled (thus doesn't work)

Proper UserScript and UserCSS is very nice feature that FireFox lacks
 
Ok, this wasn't a very impressive topic to begin with, but it's going off a cliff now. Browser discussions! Again? ;)

Dropping this in Off-Topic.
 
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