It is very tortuous install FreeBSD desktop

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It is very tortuous install FreeBSD desktop, you can not install some applications like Skype or Flash player support nor in Linux. In 2008 there was the DesktopBSD system based on FreeBSD, it was very comprehensive. Hopefully FreeBSD extends to GUI, the other derivatives are so incomplete. :)
 
Re: It is very tortuous install freebsd desk.

teo said:
It is very tortuous install freebsd desk, you can not install some applications like skype or flash player support nor in Linux.
In 2008 there was the DesktopBSD system based on FreeBSD, it was very comprehensive. Hopefully freebsd extends to GUI, the other derivatives are so incomplete. :)
On the other hand, I have absolutely no issues whatsoever installing from the disk and, in fact, don't even use the disk anymore to install from and have a complete FreeBSD desktop running for 10 years.
 
You can always try PC-BSD. It is basically FreeBSD with a GUI installer and some extra (half/not working) applications.
 
As mentioned, the DesktopBSD system you are talking about was probably PC-BSD, which I think is fairly good these days as BSD desktops go. Unless you are a heavy BSD user and specifically want to set up and configure your own desktop, I would recommend all desktop users to use PC-BSD. FreeBSD itself really isn't user friendly if you just want to install and boot up to a desktop.

Personally I still think all *nix desktops, including all the Linux variants, are still a long way off the user experience you get from Windows or OSX.
 
teo said:
It is very tortuous install FreeBSD desktop, you can not install some applications like Skype or Flash player support nor in Linux. In 2008 there was the DesktopBSD system based on FreeBSD, it was very comprehensive. Hopefully FreeBSD extends to GUI, the other derivatives are so incomplete. :)

1.You already posted this somewhere else ,so don't do that anymore.
https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=46719


2. If you find that "tortuous", then your problems have just begun.
 
hashime said:
You can always try PC-BSD. It is basically FreeBSD with a GUI installer and some extra (half/not working) applications.

If PC-BSD and tested, and is a heavy system that requires 52 GB hard disk to install, your system incomplete.
PC-BSD does not have any support for 32-bit system, why we prefer to try to install FreeBSD directly with GUI, although it is stormy. ;)
 
PC-BSDs minimum recommended is 20GB of hard disk space. In comparison, Ubuntu is 5GB but I can assure you no one runs Ubuntu with only 5GB and is happy.

PC-BSD's recommended disk space is 50GB. I haven't found what Ubuntu's is but it depends on what Ubuntu installs compared to PC-BSD. You can't just look at the numbers without knowing that. Looking at a Linux forum, I see one guy saying he's using 30GB but he can't do anything. Another guy says you need at least 60GB.

So I guess that means Linux sucks.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
PC-BSDs minimum recommended is 20GB of hard disk space. In comparison, Ubuntu is 5GB but I can assure you no one runs Ubuntu with only 5GB and is happy.

PC-BSD's recommended disk space is 50GB. I haven't found what Ubuntu's is but it depends on what Ubuntu installs compared to PC-BSD. You can't just look at the numbers without knowing that. Looking at a Linux forum, I see one guy saying he's using 30GB but he can't do anything. Another guy says you need at least 60GB.

So I guess that means Linux sucks.

I tried to install PC-BSD with 22 GB hard drive and I could not continue in GUI. Calls 52 GB hard drive.
Linux anyone said anything in this thread. ;)
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Looking at a Linux forum, I see one guy saying he's using 30GB but he can't do anything. Another guy says you need at least 60GB.

So I guess that means Linux sucks.

What on Earth are you talking about? You can run any Linux distro perfectly fine with a few GB of space. How much more you need depends on how much more of DATA (or stuff like Steam apps) you will put on your disk...
 
AzaShog said:
What on Earth are you talking about? You can run any Linux distro perfectly fine with a few GB of space. How much more you need depends on how much more of DATA (or stuff like Steam apps) you will put on your disk...
Just for the record this is not factually true. We use Springdale Linux (Princeton University clone of RHEL) in my Lab on all work stations. The installer requires more than 2 GB or RAM and default "minimal desktop" is close to 5 GB. With typical applications TeXLive, MATLAB, R, Python we typically end up using close to 30GB of HDD just for basic desktop functions and software. For a very similar OpenBSD desktop with exception of MATLAB which doesn't run on BSDs i need less than 8 GB of HDD space. MATLAB itself is 8GB (Since we are major research university we have all toolboxes §e). Replacing TeXLive pile of crap with KerTeX and using NetSurf instead of Firefox and my OpenBSD rich desktop is under 300 MB and happily running of 256 MB of RAM.

I will concede that PC-BSD is anything but light OS. Anything using ZFS as a default file system can't be light by definition. Want light fancy OS and fancy file system. Go with DragonFly.

As of FreeBSD based distros you might have a better luck with GhostBSD or even DesktopBSD http://www.desktopbsd.net/ which looks alive again. Around 2007-8 DesktopBSD definitely was much nicer than PC-BSD.
 
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AzaShog said:
drhowarddrfine said:
Looking at a Linux forum, I see one guy saying he's using 30GB but he can't do anything. Another guy says you need at least 60GB.

So I guess that means Linux sucks.

What on Earth are you talking about? You can run any Linux distro perfectly fine with a few GB of space. How much more you need depends on how much more of DATA (or stuff like Steam apps) you will put on your disk...
I do believe @drhowarddrfine's comment was meant as tongue-in-cheek ;)
 
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FreeBSD because it does not extend to desktop?.
The world need this great system installed in the main computer, and not dwell on servers only. We miss the DesktopBSD system, that was a great complete desktop system based on FreeBSD. Derivatives are totally incomplete. ;)
 
teo said:
FreeBSD because it does not extend to desktop?.
The world need this great system installed in the main computer, and not dwell on servers only. We miss the DesktopBSD system, that was a great complete desktop system based on FreeBSD. Derivatives are totally incomplete. ;)

People said this about Linux too and now look at the mess it is in. FreeBSD is a server OS. If you want to use it as a desktop, go ahead. No one will stop you. But you're using a server OS as a desktop. It's like complaining your hammer isn't very good at slicing bread.

FreeBSD is what it is. If you want a UNIX like desktop system, go with Linux or Mac OSX. Trying to make FreeBSD into something it isn't will only frustrate you and ultimately disappoint.
 
I disagree. The things that make FreeBSD a great server also make it a great desktop. There are two difficult things about creating a desktop system out of FreeBSD. The first is installing and configuring all the desktop software. That's not impossible, just annoying. The second is an automatic update that is robust enough to be run automatically. That is more difficult.
 
wblock@ said:
I disagree. The things that make FreeBSD a great server also make it a great desktop. There are two difficult things about creating a desktop system out of FreeBSD. The first is installing and configuring all the desktop software. That's not impossible, just annoying. The second is an automatic update that is robust enough to be run automatically. That is more difficult.

We'll have to agree to disagree then. FreeBSD in my nearly 20 years experience is an absolutely atrocious desktop. I say this as a FreeBSD advocate and long time user. I wouldn't use FreeBSD as a desktop, unless I was working on nothing but FreeBSD servers all day and just needed a terminal to work from. Even then I would be far more productive on anything else, including Windows from a PuTTy shell.

FreeBSD lacks pretty much everything that a modern desktop requires and is quickly falling behind even Linux as far as desktops go. FreeBSD will likely not see Wayland and with GNOME and KDE and all the others signing on to Wayland, FreeBSD will soon be stuck in legacy hell with XFCE (which really isnt developed anymore) and plain Jane Window Managers.

If you don't use a desktop for anything productive then FreeBSD is fine. Most people however could not use it on a day to day basis, and by most people I'm talking 99.99%. The people on this forum could, most could not.
 
I have to agree with @wblock against @Durden. I have been using FreeBSD as a desktop on my laptop for many years and I was happy with it most of the time. Supporting dozens of Windows servers, hundreds of Windows users, managing wireless infrastructure for 4k+ users in time where WiFi support in FreeBSD was far less developed than now, superior prints thanks to the LaTeX, which was always highly valued by colleagues running Windows without any DTP tools, even graphics using the Photoshop in Wine was someways doable (I never get used to the GIMP interface). Only reason, why I had (hopefully temporarily) migrated my mobile working environment to Mac via short stay in the Windows land is, that I have no time to cherry-pick best tools for new tasks, checking, what was broken in new versions etc., as wblock already said.

Side note: According to the wiki page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics there is a experimental port of Wayland, reference implementation is waiting on the result of the Linux game which key system component we will move upside-down today. This week we play on udev.

Of course YMMV and I am not assuming you are wrong for your scenario.
 
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ondra_knezour said:
I have to agree with @wblock against @Durden. I have been using FreeBSD as a desktop on my laptop for many years and I was happy with it most of the time. Supporting dozens of Windows servers, hundreds of Windows users, managing wireless infrastructure for 4k+ users in time where WiFi support in FreeBSD was far less developed than now, superior prints thanks to the LaTeX, which was always highly valued by colleagues running Windows without any DTP tools, even graphics using the Photoshop in Wine was someways doable (I never get used to the GIMP interface). Only reason, why I had (hopefully temporarily) migrated my mobile working environment to Mac via short stay in the Windows land is, that I have no time to cherry-pick best tools for new tasks, checking, what was broken in new versions etc., as wblock already said.

Side note: According to the wiki page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics there is a experimental port of Wayland, reference implementation is waiting on the result of the Linux game which key system component we will move upside-down today. This week we play on udev.

Of course YMMV and I am not assuming you are wrong for your scenario.

You're contradicting yourself. It's perfectly usable as a desktop and yet you had to go to Mac OSX? And Wayland will be highly reliant on systemd which isn't in FreeBSD and isn't coming to FreeBSD and the Wayland devs have no interest in supporting it.

I don't get these arguments for FreeBSD as a desktop. They are overloaded with "if" and "but" as if that somehow excuses it's atrocious desktop support. Yes you can use FreeBSD as a desktop but you will be in legacy hell and resort to using wine and Linux emulation the vast majority of the time to do anything productive. At that point, why even bother with FreeBSD?

No one should take this as an attack against FreeBSD. Its just advocating the right tool for the job. FreeBSD on the desktop is not that tool.
 
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Durden said:
You're contradicting yourself. It's perfectly usable as a desktop and yet you had to go to Mac OSX?
No, I am not :) I was talking about many years of comfortable work related desktop based on the FreeBSD. Then, new business came, with new tasks etc. with extreme time stress, so I grabbed first ThinkPad on the shelve (oh God, what they did to them, bending display, weird keyboard, what technical advance), which was loaded with Windows and with tools required already available and known to me. However, It was so counterproductive and annoying, that I move to Mac, not because it is shinny, but because it more resembles my workflow I acquired when used the FreeBSD desktop, which I unfortunately still have no time to polish enough.
Durden said:
And Wayland will be highly reliant on systemd which isn't in FreeBSD and isn't coming to FreeBSD and the Wayland devs have no interest in supporting it.

We will see. I am not interested in Wayland or systemd now, so I can't give any deeper comments, but I am sure that some solutions emerge when needed. I just wanted to notice work or at least research is already being done.
 
wblock@ is spot on. My girlfriend uses a computer a small step above how you would guess a typical 90-year-old grandparent would use a computer. Put another way, she isn't interested in how things work, she just wants to accomplish typical desktop tasks. I set up and maintain her very simple, fluxbox-based FreeBSD laptop, which has working wireless, suspend and resume, and devd-based automounting (including the memory card reader). There is a nice wallpaper that changes each time she logs in, a taskbar and I configure her web browser (www/firefox), media player (multimedia/mplayer), file manager (x11-fm/xfe), and office suite (editors/libreoffice) and she's happy. In fact, she asks me for help less than when she was running Windows. I do the same for a colleague at work and he's happy as well. It's the installation and maintenance that are challenging for typical users.

Edit: Fixed a typo.
 
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I agree with @Durden. FreeBSD desktop is far behind what a modern desktop is capable of. For starters, the inability to suspend on most, and hibernate on any machine is simply unacceptable. Second, it must have been just bad luck but I've had so many issues running software that works perfectly on Linux. Firefox crashes every now and then especially when playing HTML5 YouTube. It doesn't on Linux. And to use Flash I'd have to bring down the security of the whole system significantly with a) old, unpatched Flash plugin and b) Fedora 10 (!!!) dependencies that are full of vulnerabilities and blocked by pkg audit. I've also had some bad luck with OpenOffice opening some documents, hanging the Office with no error message. I have no idea why, and debugging is impossible because the debug flag is blocked, marking the port as broken. Detail upon detail, tiny annoyance upon tiny annoyance, bug upon bug and I'm back on desktop Linux that simply just works.

And what is worse, things are not going to get better, not with the upstreams increasingly being eveloped only for Linux.
 
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wblock@ said:
I disagree. The things that make FreeBSD a great server also make it a great desktop. There are two difficult things about creating a desktop system out of FreeBSD. The first is installing and configuring all the desktop software. That's not impossible, just annoying. The second is an automatic update that is robust enough to be run automatically. That is more difficult.
His attitude is hope that someday FreeBSD can to extend desktop, nothing is impossible. FreeBSD is a great system and many people in the world want to use it as the main system on your computer, it would be a great success.
One thing is outdated Linux using GNU tool. FreeBSD is better as Unix-based system, which uses the BSD tool, many people who leave the windows system, want to use the FreeBSD desktop system.
Some people are opposed to all growth, perhaps those people who are linked to the private monopoly of these systems?,... and therefore oppose all free growth for the world. ;)
 
teo said:
wblock@ said:
I disagree. The things that make FreeBSD a great server also make it a great desktop. There are two difficult things about creating a desktop system out of FreeBSD. The first is installing and configuring all the desktop software. That's not impossible, just annoying. The second is an automatic update that is robust enough to be run automatically. That is more difficult.
His attitude is hope that someday FreeBSD can to extend desktop, nothing is impossible. FreeBSD is a great system and many people in the world want to use it as the main system on your computer, it would be a great success.
One thing is outdated Linux using GNU tool. FreeBSD is better as Unix-based system, which uses the BSD tool, many people who leave the windows system, want to use the FreeBSD desktop system.
Some people are opposed to all growth, perhaps those people who are linked to the private monopoly of these systems?,... and therefore oppose all free growth for the world. I think they should take a look at DesktopBSD system that is based on FreeBSD, very complete. ;)

http://www.desktopbsd.net/
 
AzaShog said:
I agree with @Durden. For starters, the inability to suspend on most, and hibernate on any machine is simply unacceptable.
Complaining about that is like complaining about boot up time. Maybe they're more useful on a notebook but, on the desktop, I want to say, "Who cares?".

Second, it must have been just bad luck but I've had so many issues running software that works perfectly on Linux.
I've been running FreeBSD on the desktop for years and the only time I run into those issues is when the port didn't get ported smoothly. Eventually it does but the problem isn't true for everyone. Right now many are complaining Chromium doesn't work for them. However, I don't have the problems with Firefox or OpenOffice you complain about.

One of the main issues is having enough people to work on the port and enough variety of hardware to test on all systems. Linux has more users and, therefore, more developers to work on that. That doesn't make Linux a better OS because of it. It's just they can port outside software quicker.

Looking at it from the other direction, the problem with using Linux as a server is that then you are running Linux instead of FreeBSD. Linux itself is no longer a Unix-like system so it's like comparing FreeBSD desktop to a Windows desktop. In fact, Linux has become a Windows-like system to its detriment. Windows does it better but I wouldn't touch Windows without trembling hands, especially as a server. And I haven't used Windows in 10 years or Linux in five.
 
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drhowarddrfine said:
Complaining about that is like complaining about boot up time. Maybe they're more useful on a notebook but, on the desktop, I want to say, "Who cares?".

That's hardly the same thing and I don't see how that problem is confined only to laptops. My desktop workstation, where I primarily work, I don't want to leave it turned on every time I have to step out. And it's an annoyance, that just keeps piling up one after another when you do that for the hundredth time, that I have to go through 6 password prompts every time I return to my computer. One to unlock the encrypted disks. Two to log into the desktop. Three to unlock the SSH keys, four to sudo back to the tmux env on the servers. Five to unlock master Firefox password. Six to unlock master Thunderbird password (because I have several different email accounts I can't just consolidate into one). Then I need to reactivate the python development virtualenvs in the terminals, and restore my gvim session - thankfully that's just a source command away.

And this pattern is in no way special or specific just to me. If you're a power user, I'm sure you'll find the inability to suspend or hibernate your workstation a real PITA.


Looking at it from the other direction, the problem with using Linux as a server is that then you are running Linux instead of FreeBSD. Linux itself is no longer a Unix-like system so it's like comparing FreeBSD desktop to a Windows desktop. In fact, Linux has become a Windows-like system to its detriment. Windows does it better but I wouldn't touch Windows without trembling hands, especially as a server. And I haven't used Windows in 10 years or Linux in five.

I disagree. As long as the majority of its ecosystem is open source, and as long as the shared lib model is prevalent, Linux will never be Windows-like. There, just this morning I applied some updates to my Windows box and was thinking how I like the fact that on Linux (and FreeBSD too!) I can see exactly which component is being updated and why, I can check the changelog and know what is going on. Just a vague "Update to 64-bit systems" on Windows is far, far away from that, even the quoted KB page doesn't say much more. Linux systems are really far from that.

Besides, that Linux is becoming less UNIX-like is not really a bad thing. There's plenty of options if you need UNIX or UNIX-like OS, namely the BSDs. There is nothing wrong about Linux evolving into something that is not UNIX-like any more. Does it have to be? And it's really not becoming Windows either. But I agree, at some point, saying that Linux is a UNIX-like system will have to stop.
 
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