Preferred DE of the FreeBSD users

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

  • Total voters
    192
Maxnix said:
The easiest way to try it is to install OpenBSD and enable xenodm (its disply manager) at boot time (the installer will ask you for this). It's already configured OOTB.
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Are you promoting OpenBSD? I'll report to SirDice now 😜
I've always loved OpenBSD projects. I think it has been ported even to Linux and Hyperbola distro use it. I hope it'll be added to FreeBSD ports too.
 
The problem is the relentless work to keep the X server itself and associated libraries up to date, what with the constant steam of new graphics chips hitting the market, especially if companies like dead rat or intel pull out and provide no support; and there is all the work to keep supporting old hardware. That's a lot of work to keep up, the obsd team will have plenty to do if xenocara becomes the last redoubt. Already mesa 22.0 has retired i915, on my system I now only have GL 1.4, not 2 as it was in previous versions, and modesetting driver only. Not pointing the finger at the developers, its a ton of work to keep going with, I can understand their decision. Perhaps the 'amber' driver will give older hardware some way to continue limping on.

Mesa's Classic Drivers Have Been Retired - Affecting ATI R100/R200 & More - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com

I guess there is always the unaccelerated vesa driver to fall back on, for the time being anyway, so it should always be possible to have basic 2D graphics.

Keith Packard addressed some of these topics in this talk from 2015:-

Keith Packard Talks About Sustaining X11's Development - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com

On a more positive note... what might well save X for the time being is huge user demand from the linux installed base. I still don't see wayland being ready for prime time. And loss of network transparency is bound to result in a backlash from the user base.

..
 
Maxnix said:
The easiest way to try it is to install OpenBSD and enable xenodm (its disply manager) at boot time (the installer will ask you for this). It's already configured OOTB.
Click to expand...
Xenocara works pretty well on my ten-year-old thinkpad, I gave it a spin a few years ago. It's good stuff.
 
itsthosestonesman said:
The problem is the relentless work to keep the X server itself and associated libraries up to date, what with the constant steam of new graphics chips hitting the market.
Click to expand...
Weirdly, since the whole kms/drm stuff, this is much easier. Since moving away from userland drivers, we are also moving away from vendor specific Xorg drivers too. (In many ways similar to the three main Wayland compositors)

Check out the modesetting driver (this works for amdgpu, nouveau, intel, etc):

https://github.com/freedesktop/xf86-video-modesetting/tree/master/src
https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/tree/master/hw/xfree86/drivers/modesetting

This is actually even simpler than vesa. And the "new vesa" UEFI wsfb is only a single file:

https://github.com/openbsd/xenocara/tree/master/driver/xf86-video-wsfb/src

If I recall, much of Xenocara is maintained by very few people. Mainly Matthiew Herrb (one of the main Xorg developers).

If you consider that each *individual* Wayland compositor needs to do this themselves anyway, you can pretty much guarantee that Xorg's libdrm modesetting driver will never lag behind in comparison. Many people using nouveau or amdgpu cards are actually using this one unsuspectingly.
 
Interesting, I wasn't aware. Always look at the source first haha. Clearly a lot of work has been done to clean the x-server up, I haven't looked at it for a long time.

To a first approximation:-

$ ~/xorg-xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/modesetting$ grep ';' *.[ch] | wc -l
3759

So yes, the modesetting driver is really quite small, very nice.

And for the entire xfree86 tree:-

$ ~/xorg-xserver/hw/xfree86$ find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep ';' | wc -l
43720

Which doesn't seem particularly large. Impressive if you've been able to factorise it to the point where only the small driver code needs to be tweaked
for new hardware, and most of the rest remains unchanged. Very nice.

wsfb-driver.c is only 1500 lines of text!

Hmm, that's actually cheered me up a bit, my earlier post sounds overly gloomy haha :)

Just for interest, the entire codebase is:-

$ ~/xorg-xserver$ find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep ';' | wc -l
174454

Which is getting a bit bigger, but certainly not what might be called large. And that's everything.
 
itsthosestonesman said:
Hmm, that's actually cheered me up a bit, my earlier post sounds overly gloomy haha :)
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Heh, yeah I was also pleasantly surprised when I first started digging around it (whilst stealing bits of code to draw directly to the framebuffer)

Admittedly I think it is still a lot to maintain for one guy. However, it also unfortunately reflects the workload of independent Wayland compositors too. Leading to a greatly diminished choice compared to X11 Window Managers. wl_roots will help to alleviate the problem in the Wayland community somewhat. Although we already have Xwayland, Perhaps one day we will also see a wl_roots Xorg driver if we remain with a standalone Xserver?
 
Oh yes, that's definitely a lot for one person to maintain, I would have expected a small team for that size codebase, perhaps 2-3 developers plus a couple of testers,
for a project under active devlopment, unless it's really <<very>> stable.

For a bit more interest, the top-level dirs break down like this:-

Code: 
$ ~/xorg-xserver$ for i in $(ls -d */); do echo -n "$i "; find $i -name '*.[chly]' | xargs grep ';' | wc -l ; done | column -t
composite/    1263
config/       689
damageext/    310
dbe/          578
dix/          15786
doc/          0
dri3/         529
exa/          3011
fb/           2550
glamor/       6418
glx/          10167
hw/           69309
include/      3591
m4/           0
man/          0
mi/           8244
miext/        3756
os/           4757
present/      1031
pseudoramiX/  216
randr/        4763
record/       1077
render/       3652
test/         4902
Xext/         10369
xfixes/       1215
Xi/           5477
xkb/          11000

'hw' is the largest by a long shot, pretty much as expected. I didn't count the python but there's some of that hiding away in there as well.

Don't know enough about wayland to comment on your other points, but my hunch is you are suggesting an xorg driver that would run inside wayland to implement an x-server. I remember many years ago there was a project to put an x-server inside the browser, so one could run X clients within a browser, I forget the name of the project. Similar idea.
 
I've been using fvwm3 (very basically, default configuration) inside a nested xephyr session. Very nice. Seems nice and stable.

So I have wmaker as my primary window manager, and run xephyr full screen in one of the virtual desktops, with fvwm as the wm on the xephyr display.
2023-04-05-15:53:55_2560x1600.png
 
Alain De Vos said:
I use enlightnment on Gentoo. And it is much more polished & attractive compared to enlightenment on FreeBSD.
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I remember when open Solaris was launched. Their implementation and presentation of gnome was superior to what was being done on Linux at the time.

I actually looked into moving to an Illumos based system before deciding on FreeBSD.

But I will say that in regard to polish I've noticed no difference from my prior os. But then again I've not used e in a while. I think the last time was in 09 on Mandriva with an HP TC-4400.
 
Something like fvwm is very useful when you want to spin up an x server and test some new code out in isolation. And it can be used as a full desktop, I used it for years back on early linux. I wouldn't call it half-baked :) Very useful even nowadays for certain situations.

Check it out: https://www.fvwm.org/
 
Paul Floyd said:
That doesn't mean that ever more choice is better.
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Of course not.
I am pretty much satisfied with fvwm2.
(And, as it turned out, others, too [can't be that bad, then.])

Thats does not mean:
- there is no other, equal, or even better one.
Once you've digged into one, have a working config, satisfying you,
there has to be a very good reason to change, dig into another one, again, and recreate a new config, again.
- and especially not that everybody shall use it
(but some may give it a shot, if one has yet not found, what satisfies him [as, of course, others.])

But most of all I pretty much like the idea of free choices.
That's why I'm so sensible against having a default DE/WM.
The choice would be done.
Besides some systems/user don't need/want one.
But I already said this.
 
I've never been one to appreciate the lack of an x session on boot. But reading the handbook made the absence pretty valuable considering the amount of choices for configuration. And not having bits of data taken that will not be utilized. I have to say I actually find it very considerate. The system can be used with or without but there is no need to remove unused bits unless I put them there of course. I was surprised when I installed FreeBSD but the system has proved to be fantastic for my use on the desktop.
 
LibreQuest said:
I remember when open Solaris was launched. Their implementation and presentation of gnome was superior to what was being done on Linux at the time.

I actually looked into moving to an Illumos based system before deciding on FreeBSD.

But I will say that in regard to polish I've noticed no difference from my prior os. But then again I've not used e in a while. I think the last time was in 09 on Mandriva with an HP TC-4400.
Click to expand...
Seems like illumos is still a thing:- https://www.illumos.org/ I think I tried open solaris once out of curiosity when sun launched it. But oracle soon killed it off. Don't know what happened to sparc, I guess they sunsetted that too. It's a real shame, sun did some good stuff, like sgi.
 
Profighost said:
Of course not.
I am pretty much satisfied with fvwm2.
(And, as it turned out, others, too [can't be that bad, then.])

Thats does not mean:
- there is no other, equal, or even better one.
Once you've digged into one, have a working config, satisfying you,
there has to be a very good reason to change, dig into another one, again, and recreate a new config, again.
- and especially not that everybody shall use it
(but some may give it a shot, if one has yet not found, what satisfies him [as, of course, others.])

But most of all I pretty much like the idea of free choices.
That's why I'm so sensible against having a default DE/WM.
The choice would be done.
Besides some systems/user don't need/want one.
But I already said this.
Click to expand...
Hey profighost, would be interesting to see what your fvwm config looks like. There are some very nice ones on fvwm.org.
 
LibreQuest said:
No way, that's pretty rad. Haha
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A minimal wm like twm might actually be a good choice for netbsd. Given that they target a large group of different machine architectures, including some very small and/or old machines, a window manager with minimal resource requirements which nonetheless provides a basic X desktop might be a good choice. That is the kind of scenario where my suggestion of kde plasma would fall down, it's just too large to install on some of the machines that netbsd can be installed on.

And.. twm is from xorg. No dependency on any other development team. Maybe a combination of sddm plus twm isn't such a bad idea for freebsd, given that the user can add whatever they desire after install time. Or maybe have 3 install options:-
1. no X
2. X plus twm
3. X plus XFCE or KDE
 
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