Preferred DE of the FreeBSD users

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

  • Total voters
    192
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.
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Indeed. I believe the work that Sun did on gnome basically reached the peak of the open-source desktop.

f3-1866752.gif


And then just all down hill from here. First thing that freedesktop did was break all the themes. Then break the desktop metaphore. Now breaking the underlying display system ;)
 
1680712845137.png


It does look quite good, I have a very faint memory of seeing this.

"And then just all down hill from here. First thing that freedesktop did was break all the themes. Then break the desktop metaphore. Now breaking the underlying display system". Hahaha, rofl.

Well, we don't want it getting too good, do we?? It might start competing with you-know-who...
 
itsthosestonesman said:
interesting to see what your fvwm config looks like. There are some very nice ones on fvwm.org
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I know. Not only. One may find several, if you ddgo them.
Even way better looking ones as mine.
But as i pointed out, looks are not my primary interest.

If looks are a concern, and you dig a bit into it, you can make fvwm look really futuristic and cool.
Changing a wallpaper, font and color is not that hard. You don't to have really dig into it for doing that.

The default is boring (thx for the fvwm3 screenshot - looks exactly like default fvwm2 😁 - but it may be more stable, faster, flexible, or even better to config (I did not take a closer look yet.)


I've posted some screenshots under FreeBSD Screen Shots
Page 75 (at my config) March 1, 2022
Page 82 March 25, 2023

Instead of posting the whole config (it's the modified default, and not really that well documented to be shown [and mixup of english and german]) I can give the parts I modified, cut out the rest.
I have three different monitors as one screen - I spare you this part 😁
 

Attachments

  • config.txt
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I am a FreeBSD newbie.

Coming from the Linux world, I used Mate and LXQT and loved both for their being lightweight fast and well working tools and configuration options.

Only thing I dont like about LXQT is the SDDM which is very slow in my opinion.

In terms of speed as of now LXDE is fastest in my opinion.

Haven't has a chance check out Gnome 44 the latest release which is touted to be the greatest release of Gnome and has got great reviews but will check out and update soon.

Have installed both LXQT and Mate on FreeBSD but am missing the fully working out of the box when on Linux.

In FreeBSD have to do a lot of configuration as well as check out for addons and tools.
 
bsduck said:
SDDM and LXQt are unrelated. You can log in and start a LXQt session from whatever display manager you want (XDM, LightDM, etc.) or from the command line.
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I actually like gdm but it doesn't like offering options for Wayland for some reason.
 
bsduck said:
SDDM and LXQt are unrelated. You can log in and start a LXQt session from whatever display manager you want (XDM, LightDM, etc.) or from the command line.
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yes, true, but mostly LXQT n SDDM are paired as in usually at least on linux, with LXQT, SDDM is also installed by default.

Am yet to check out why and also pros n cons of pairing it with other DMs.

Also, it take a lot of time for LXQT desktop to appear after entering password at SDDM on FreeBSD.

So, will check the lightDM n other options.
 
sagsaw said:
Also, it take a lot of time for LXQT desktop to appear after entering password at SDDM on FreeBSD.
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I guess your system is installed on a HDD? On a SSD it is definitely fast to load. How long does it take exactly on your machine? Until last year I had a LXQt desktop running from a HDD and while not fast, the loading process never felt annoyingly slow either.
 
bsduck said:
I guess your system is installed on a HDD? On a SSD it is definitely fast to load. How long does it take exactly on your machine? Until last year I had a LXQt desktop running from a HDD and while not fast, the loading process never felt annoyingly slow either.
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comparing to Linux on HDD, LXQT with SDDM on FreeBSD is definitely a bit slow

will try to get the exact time metrics.
 
I use Gnome4 on Linux but when I started learning FreeBSD I wanted something that felt (for lack of better terms) more unique and native. I dabbled with a couple DEs/WMs and eventually landed on XFCE4 which felt both user-friendly and customisable, and also strangely comforting in a retro/oldschool kind of way.

The other night I also tried nsCDE which was nice and has even stronger retro vibes but it's not something I would want to use as a daily driver. It gave me some good ideas for customising XFCE4 though!
 
A different angle on this is what would you recommend to a FreeBSD newbie looking for a work station?
I'll make an argument that XFCE4 is the most BSDunix friendly largely because 2 OpenBSD members are core XFCE4 developers.
Gnome is driven by IBM/Redhat and KDE by Suse and I'm not aware that any BSD developer has much input into either. The OpenBSD porter for Gnome frequently complains that his submitted patches, for unix compatibility, are ignored or rejected.

I haven't looked but I would wager that XFCE4 has fewer FreeBSD bug reports compared to Gnome and KDE.
 
shepper said:
I haven't looked but I would wager that XFCE4 has fewer FreeBSD bug reports compared to Gnome and KDE.
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It would be more interesting to see that on a per-user basis... I just suspect that among FreeBSD users, KDE and GNOME have a bigger audience, so in terms of absolute numbers, KDE or GNOME would have more bug reports. ;)
 
astyle said:
It would be more interesting to see that on a per-user basis... I just suspect that among FreeBSD users, KDE and GNOME have a bigger audience, so in terms of absolute numbers, KDE or GNOME would have more bug reports. ;)
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If the current poll is any indicator:
XFCE4 = 26.5%
KDE = 17.1%
Gnome = 5.9%
 
shepper said:
If the current poll is any indicator:
XFCE4 = 26.5%
KDE = 17.1%
Gnome = 5.9%
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Ah, from the start of this thread... Yeah, based on that, I'd expect GNOME to have the least number of bug reports involving FreeBSD... I have a nagging suspicion that could be related to the fact that GNOME on FreeBSD is pretty out of date, unlike KDE and XFCE. GNOME certainly has a much bigger code base than XFCE4, which means a bigger surface for bugs. Good statistics are very difficult to collect in the software world... Having very few bug reports can be correlated to lots of stuff, like software not being very popular - or software being very simple - or software being high quality, right? Correlation does not imply causation.
 
shepper said:
Gnome is driven by IBM/Redhat and KDE by Suse
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I agree about the close relationship between GNOME and Red Hat, but I very much doubt SUSE has a major influence on the KDE project nowadays. SUSE Entreprise Linux releases have been featuring GNOME as the only supported desktop environment for almost a decade (beginning with SLED 12 in 2014) so the company clearly doesn't have commercial interests in KDE anymore.
 
DeliciousD said:
I'm a Windowmaker guy.
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I have a colleague who uses this and was recently impressed by some of its features. I had played with it before, but never really know some of these.
  • Pretty much complete ICCM standards. Rivalling OpenBox and is one of the best for compat.
  • Very minimal dependencies (when built manually)
  • Provides its own tiny C GUI library (WINGS). My colleague has loads of small tools written in this
  • Has a cool legacy from the 4.3BSD days
  • Per class, WM_NAME attribute menus to fix broken X11 programs
  • A recently maintained portable file manager that integrates well with it if you don't want GNUstep.
  • Actively developed
 
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