Using FreeBSD as Desktop OS

20-100-2fe said:
Definitely!

I've never felt comfortable with Apple's way of doing things, starting with UI design,
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When it comes to the UI, I personally find Apple's the best for me. So I would attempt to replicate it.
I guess it stands to reason when you find a number of posts about Linux and Windows saying, "Make your OS look like a Mac". Hardly find anything the other way around.

20-100-2fe said:
I also hate that someone reads my emails - to notify me of upcoming bills, for instance, as if I didn't already know.
I feel insulted by such practices.
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I have never had that. However I think that Microsoft Outlook does it. Because I find that tasks appearing in my office box without me even entering them. So Microsoft is quite invasive IMO and the same for Google I guess.

In my experience, even though Apple has the data that you give it, it does really nothing with it; except store it for your own use. In terms of privacy, I guess that is kind of giving a company too much power over your user experience and devices, but you have the option to turn off those features if you don't want. That is why I prefer to use iOS over Android any day.
I watched a video where someone actually tested an iPhone vs Android in terms of privacy and the results were amazing.

20-100-2fe said:
So I ended up renting a VPS and having my own email system and web server.
I've learned (and still learn) a lot doing it and this is a great advantage for me - learning is one of the things I enjoy the most. :)
It's also a great playground for my creativity: whenever an idea strikes me, I can easily implement it, for real. :)
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The one thing with open source stuff is that if you have a good idea and you know how to develop it, you can do some pretty cool things. I am amazed at the things that Linux developers have accomplished over the years. And you do learn a lot in the process.
When actually building a desktop with FreeBSD, you get real control into what goes in a modern OS.. So it is quite interesting.
 
Is Gnome-3.3x fully working in FreeBSD 12? I managed to get Gnome running fine with elogind/eudev etc in Devuan, thought if it is possible in FreeBSD.
 
For me, FVWM rocks because it is extremely customizable and still kind of small and efficient. For a full Desktop, I like KDE very much, but I can also configure my own "nearly full" desktop based on FVWM, and it runs considerably faster on older hardware. As just a little example for the flexibility, I made a middle-click on a titlebar the command to automatically re-place this window as if it was newly mapped :)
 
20-100-2fe said:
Lamia, can you give a couple of examples of what makes FVWM rock?
And explain the difference between fvwm2 and fvwm-crystal?
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It is a Dynamic Window Manager. It is powerful, stable, lightweight and highly customisable. You can make your own desktop environment (like MATE and KDE) from it. All it requires is a text editor to make changes to its config file.

In the beginning was Fvwm. Fvwm-crystal is actually based on fvwm2 but with many other features - ready to use with your choice theme.
 
20-100-2fe said:
I've recently switched from MATE to KDE. I had always stayed away from it in the past because it was too complex and too heavy, but version 5 is really impressive performance-wise. Besides speed, the user experience is smooth and seamless, a real pleasure.
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Agreed 100%. Moved from MATE to KDE5 as well:)
I always avoided KDE in the past because it was too heavy and complex but KDE5 is really impressive about performance comparing with GNOME3.
 
My favorite DE of all time was Gnome 2.x. I don't use a DE now but Mate` was my favorite after the demise of Gnome 2.x. KDE is actually very light for its capabilities. Gnome 3 is, to me, visually unappealing, too simple and very heavy in terms of resources. Actually, I am pretty sure despite its "simplicity", Gnome 3 is the most resource hungry desktop environment available in the open source landscape.

For whatever silly reason, on FreeBSD I only use Fluxbox, never a DE. No clue why but I am an odd one so...🤪
 
On FreeBSD I tried Fluxbox, Openbox, Xfce, Mate, KDE/Plasma.
No doubt KDE/Plasma is most advanced but FreeBSD version is less modular and require some weird dependencies (MySQL server?) than other implementations of KDE/Plasma that I used, xfce has some filesystem issues.
I settled with Openbox.
 
mickey said:
It actually is optional, you can switch to postgresql or sqlite instead, if you're building from ports that is. Why the default uses mysql server however is one thing that also got me wondering.
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You mean baloo can be completely removed, or just the DB back-end configured?
 
20-100-2fe said:
You mean baloo can be completely removed, or just the DB back-end configured?
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In the past, I changed some baloo config before KDE had worked correctly, i.e. without using 100% CPU all day long. To remove it completely, without messing with KDE, I think you should edit port/Makefile. I didn't. I installed it from pkg, not port. I guess, If you're going to install install KDE from the pkg, you have no way to uninstall baloo without removing KDE. port/Makefiles is different story. By the way, KDE team should be ashamed of themselves, to put this entity, aka baloo in their system. At the time, default config of baloo was rubbish. That was the last time I've tried KDE.
[EDIT]: There are find(1) and grep(1) in the system. Massive indexing! I don't get it.
 
vigole said:
In the past, I changed some baloo config before KDE had worked correctly, i.e. without using 100% CPU all day long. To remove it completely, without messing with KDE, I think you should edit port/Makefile. I didn't. I installed it from pkg, not port. I guess, If you're going to install install KDE from the pkg, you have no way to uninstall baloo without removing KDE. port/Makefiles is different story. By the way, KDE team should be ashamed of themselves, to put this entity, aka baloo in their system. At the time, default config of baloo was rubbish. That was the last time I've tried KDE.
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:) Instead of fixing it, you can easily disable baloo in the KDE systemsettings: Search for "baloo" -> file search (or similar, I have german translation) -> disable. Sadly so, I had to do that after the Q3/2020 upgrade, and I'll file in a kind bug report...
 
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20-100-2fe said:
It seems MySQL Server is required by baloo, a feature that I'd prefer optional.
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Code: 
root@freya ~>  pkg install kf5-baloo
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 3 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        kf5-baloo: 5.71.0
        kf5-kidletime: 5.71.0
        lmdb: 0.9.24_2,1

Number of packages to be installed: 3

The process will require 3 MiB more space.
524 KiB to be downloaded.

Proceed with this action? [y/N]: n
root@freya ~>  pkg info | grep sql
php74-mysqli-7.4.8             The mysqli shared extension for php
py37-sqlite3-3.7.8_7           Standard Python binding to the SQLite3 library (Python 3.7)
qt5-sql-5.14.2                 Qt SQL database integration module
qt5-sqldrivers-mysql-5.15.0    Qt MySQL database plugin
qt5-sqldrivers-sqlite3-5.14.2  Qt SQLite 3 database plugin
sqlite3-3.32.2,1               SQL database engine in a C library
tcl-sqlite3-3.32.3             SQLite extension for Tcl using the Tcl Extension Architecture (TEA)
root@freya ~>

As you see: The baloo package doesn't pull in MySQL. But there's one thing different on my machine: I'm compiling databases/akonadi from ports, as this package always wanted me to have MySQL - and I do not. Same goes with many other software.: akonadi is the annoying package.
 
mjollnir said:
:) Instead of fixing it, you can easily disable baloo in the KDE systemsettings: Search for "baloo" -> file search (or similar, I have german translation) -> disable. Sadly so, I had to do that, and I'll file in a kind bug report...
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Yes, that's what I did. :)

However, bringing in an RDBMS when installing a DE look completely insane to me.
Just like bringing in Xorg when installing Samba on a headless server.

vigole said:
There are find(1) and grep(1) in the system. Massive indexing! I don't get it.
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Yes, neither do I. Under Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, it is easy to organize one's files so as to find them equally easily.
The only place where I need a search tool is in shell scripts and find(1) is designed for that.
Plus, when I use it, it is seldom below my home directory.

Under Windows, it's another story and the only way to find something is often to search for it.

My guess is that KDE aims at being a Windows-killer and its developers want to be able to say they have the same features as Windows, even when they make no sense under another OS.
 
20-100-2fe said:
However, bringing in an RDBMS when installing a DE look completely insane to me.
Just like bringing in Xorg when installing Samba on a headless server.
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IMHO it's reasonable to have a prefix-oriented full-text index (aka tries, like the locate(1) DB). To use a full-blown RDBMS for that purpose is certainly overkill... I have to admit that baloo worked fine until I added some unusual setup in my $HOME (unionfs).
My guess is that KDE aims at being a Windows-killer and its developers want to be able to say they have the same features as Windows, even when they make no sense under another OS.
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My impression is they're more keen to come up with new features than to fix their existing bugs... :(
If it goes on like this, I'll cancel my annual donation to KDE and switch to e.g. LxDE.
 
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