Preferred DE of the FreeBSD users

Which is your current DE or WM? If not listed please specify!

  • Total voters
    192
So far, just to recap, folks here prefer minimalism against complexity, we may say that XFCE4 is a minimalistic DE if compared to KDE, however the sum of stacking and tiling VM is more than the others DEs excluded KDE, GNOME and also Mate (which I do not consider lighter or minimalist as XFCE4).

Gnome, KDE, Mate: 21
Other DEs: 23
Stacking/Tiling VMs: 28

👏👏👏
 
Zirias said:
... FreeBSD is a general-purpose OS. It is self-contained, (mostly?) POSIX-compliant, and capable of running any *nix software. ..... One reason I prefer KDE out of the "full-featured" desktops is: they care about portability, they even have a task-force for KDE on FreeBSD.
Click to expand...

Over time I've almost always used a customized fluxbox environment but have found Plasma to be very good on FreeBSD.

Now I would like to express thanks to the FreeBSD Gnome maintainers who have done a herculean job of bring Gnome 40 up to date and solid reliable on FreeBSD. I did tire of Plasma needing tweaks and I never got done with the tweaking. So on Linux systems (Gentoo) I switched to Gnome and really liked the workflow (nice navigation and minimal display to distract attention from The Work).

I switched to Gnome 40 on FreeBSD and it has been very good. Those who have found in the past that Gnome on FreeBSD is far outdated and not very good should take a look at what has been accomplished. FreeBSD is rapidly becoming a great general purpose operating system.

Thank you FreeBSD Gnome Maintainers!
 
Excess of choice is not a virtue in this case. A polished desktop base with the ability to extend is needed. Something like the Lisp of desktops. I like all desktops, but Xfce gets the job done efficiently. On the other hand, it needs to catch up, Xfburn seems like a thing of the past. Things like KDE Connect or Kirogi show a desktop from this century.

apps.kde.org

Kirogi

UAV (drone) ground control
apps.kde.org apps.kde.org
 
garry said:
… FreeBSD is rapidly becoming a great general purpose operating system. …
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say rapid, but the improvements are significant, and nicely focused.

The areas on the Foundation's technology roadmap:
  • Focus area 1: end user (laptop and desktop)
𠄶– and so on.

tgl said:
… MacOS has its design defects, …
Click to expand...

True. ▶ <https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/535465> – why I switched.

tgl said:
So far, just to recap, folks here prefer minimalism against complexity, …
Click to expand...

Also, consider the possibility that users of things such as KDE Plasma tend to go elsewhere.
 
I think, the purpose of desktop environments is to make personal computers more
accessible to people that are not familiarized with computers. It is the idea of
Steve Jobs. Not a bad idea. But this inflation of desktop environments, the fact that
it is even here, where most of the forum members are not computer illiterates, a
continuously recurring discussion issue shows that something went wrong.

I really do not understand for what I need a desktop environment. If there is a win for me, an advantage over twm, then very little, so little, that it is not in relation to the lost due to the overload of my computer, to the price of electricity if I have to use a more powerful computer only to run a desktop environment.
 
I use KDE Plasma on a daily base. It's the only Desktop I can tell where I want to have my windows positioned and the size of the window
when I start a software. Means a window starts in the same size and position where I left it the last time. Even after a reboot everything
is there where I want it to be.
I'm not aware of any other desktop/wm that can do this and I just don't want to miss this feature.

Some people also say KDE is heavy and bloated. This was true for KDE 4 but for sure not for Plasma anymore. Plasma is lite and fast
and if someone likes to keep the bloat out install a minimal version. This way you just get the absolutely minimum Desktop after
installing it plus an x terminal. No games and other crap. That's all and than build it up from there.
 
grahamperrin said:
I wouldn't say rapid, but the improvements are significant, and nicely focused.

The areas on the Foundation's technology roadmap:
  • Focus area 1: end user (laptop and desktop)
𠄶– and so on.
Click to expand...

Looks like the FreeBSD Foundation and the users base have different perspective of the issue.

I followed all the sad path of PC-BSD, TrueOS till Project Trident and Void Linux. So far, based on my knowledge, "desktop" distro have been left on the hands of someone else: Ghost, Midnight, Nomad-BSD. These projects are not recognized as "official" hence them really cannot help the diffusion on the desktop space, if the point here is to offer an OS ready to use to people that think computers should work by default.

I firmly believe that without a default environment and already packed setting you won't go so far. However this topic is really sensitive and people get quickly annoyed by just reading about it.

I know this is digression but the strategy to address this issues in my opinion would be to create an official spin-off that offers to install a DE and assists to install for instance the right video driver, audio, etc. You may call it BeastieBSD or Beastie OS, would be nice and directly related with FreeBSD.

By the other hand if the intention is to improve adoption over the current base and get more "power users" playing on the desktop side what I stated above is irrelevant and the issue probably lies elsewhere.

Probably the foundation had better to understand what the current users base want and talking with the users base to understand a way that makes all the parts involved satisfied and happy.
 
tgl said:
Sorry dude, it looks that you are the only one having an interest on pushing FreeBSD in the desktop space.
Click to expand...
There are other people who post tutorials in that section I used somebody after spending 7 years with PC-BSD and never building one from scratch till I came here. It was a trill I still remember today in achieving something I'd been wanting to do for years.

And like I said, vermaden has a multi-part tutorial he promotes and keeps updated. It's one thing to talk the talk and blow wind about doing something about it. There's already another thread of this type where people are talking about how other people could make custom themes.

It's another to get out there and work it like a carny barker to shamelessly promote yourself site and your site in front of people who have heard you pitch it every time you've shown up the past year.

But you're right. I'm a one man show working without a wire.

The crappiest job in the Circus falls to the owner. He's the guy with the broom in back of the parade. Left to clean up the mess after the show is over, and those clowns stick me with it every time.
 
tgl said:
𣀦… Probably the foundation had better to understand what the current users base want and talking with the users base to understand a way that makes all the parts involved satisfied and happy.
Click to expand...

The Foundation does so.

Please see, for example:

forums.freebsd.org

Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas

Hello all, There is a thread on the freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list seeking project ideas. If you have ideas about projects that the Foundation could support, please leave your feedback. -- Joe (with Foundation hat on)
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

tgl said:
… the strategy to address this issues in my opinion would be to create an official spin-off …
Click to expand...

I understand the wish, but I think it better, for now, to spin nothing off.

For now, continue to make FreeBSD a better basis for desktop/notebook/laptop use cases.
 
I'd like to clarify this...

For me the most lovely, funny, interesting part is the installation one, I love to do everything by hand even though I would like to avoid the boring parts.

I got that FreeBSD has more use in a production environment rather than in laptop hence changing the installer would be really dramatic.

In a desktop installation the right hardware solves 99% of the issues, for the other stuff you need to learn those. So far I had real issues with the audio which I solved, but I need to come back because it happened right when recently the server were down. It was related with the audio and the jacks and there wasn't anything in the Handbook.

Maybe if I had installed pulse the issue would be solved in a blink, but please no more pulse anymore... 😁

What's the point?

The handbook doesn't still cover all the problematic a desktop installation may address, if combined with the lack of automation during the installation process it means that you can rely only on the community, this is not really ideal.

I am not blaming the handbook which is amazing, this is what it is, and the handbook is always getting better, it is more a matter of time.
 
Cthulhux said:
It's hard to compare different polls with different questions.
Click to expand...

I bookmarked the breakdown a few months ago, without attempting to analyse it. For me, the intentions were to discover a little more about:
  • differences between the five distros
  • popularity of KDE Plasma beyond users of FreeBSD.
Until today, I was vaguely aware of only three basics with regard to desktop environments other than Plasma:
  1. Ubuntu uses GNOME
  2. MATE was forked from GNOME
  3. GNOME has an immovable global menu bar across the top of the screen (sparsely populated, limited functionality), plus some stuff running down the left side of the screen.
After spending an hour or so with Wikipedia pages, some focus on screenshots at top right of each page, I think it's like this (correct me, please, if I'm wrong):
  • Arch is the only one (of the five) that has no default desktop environment, ISO images include experimental archinstall a.k.a. Arch Installer, which (amongst other things) allows installation of a DE
  • three of five (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) have GNOME as the default DE
  • one (openSUSE) has Plasma as its default DE
  • the Open Build Service is significant.
The opening poster's primary thread explained why only five distros were charted.

1650299939907.png
Re: the screenshot to the left, Plasma might be fairly popular with users of Debian because Plasma is available on Debian's website – is that a reasonable assumption?


So, if read the five charts for Linux alongside the poll here, one chart is comparable:
  • Arch, where Plasma was most popular
– with i3, GNOME, XFce and dwm in second, third, fourth and fifth places.
 
RoGeorge said:
When I left Windows 10, apart from picking what OS to replace it with (so to work on the same desktop's hardware), it took a while to settle to a GUI. Tested Gnome, KDE Plasma, XFCE, LXDE and they were all lacking at a good dark theme out of the box + a search based launcher (don't want to navigate with the mouse). That was some years ago.

Settled to KDE Plasma, which was very flexible and with most of the settings exposed without tinkering under the hood. Turning it into a decent dark themed desktop was always painful, impossible without tuning each program to use a dark theme.

I like Plasma, but honestly it feels heavy if not bloated. What I really want from a GUI is to:
1. - start files or programs (in a flattened hierarchy) by pressing SUPER + few letters from the name + ENTER
2. - have a dark theme where all the windows follow the same dark background + white ink
3. - have delimited windows/buttons/textboxes/etc. I can not work with borderless graphic items
4. - a taskbar that preserves the opening order for each window
5. - has graphic elements made for mouse + keyb and a high res. monitor, i.e. 4k (not for touch screens)

Preferably rounded corners, don't care about fancy effects but a little 3D look for GUI elements would be nice, but not overboard eye-candy like glassy buttons and translucent windows.

Is there any other GUI I should try for the above 5 must have, please? The simpler the better.
(apart from Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, LXDE which I've already tried)
Click to expand...
GNOME 43 has a really nice dark theme now with libadwaita in my opinion.
 
For now o using KDE. I deleted xfce, because i have problems with removing usb sticks. With KDE all my programs works as expected.Even simple functions like "reboot" and "shutdown" work as they should. It didn't work in XFCE, and I had no desire to modify system files by adding rules. Previously, I only used window managers, but decided to jump into the DE league :)
 
On my laptop, it's a Fluxbox.
On a stationary PC - Window Maker.
There is still a very old PC on which I am thinking of installing IceWM, but those are plans for the future....
I like Window Managers better than Desktop Environments. The simpler the more dependable.
 
I used to install KDE earlier, but recently KDE has shown a lot of bugs, the second choice was always enlightenment, but without engage dock, enlightenment is not good enough. So, presently, I would prefer, either ratpoison or stumpwm. It may sound a bit crazy, but once you made some tweaks in the config file, like including a top menu bar and putting rofi and/or dmenu and theme it like launchpad, it will be better than a lightweight desktop environment, yeah, but still you need to dirty your hands a bit. Ratpoison is easy to configure, but stumpwm has more options, but those who have vision problem, stumpwm is gonna be a nightmare because there are not much options to configure your fonts. Those who want a windowsy appearance kde or xfce or lxqt or whatsoever will work. Enlightenment is of course good, but I personally prefer zooming/magnification properties for a dock, engage dock is not available in freebsd version and also not available in most linux distros, I wonder why they ditched that dock, because it was even better than cairo or latte or plank.
 
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