Using FreeBSD as Desktop OS

Snurg said:
No nouveau
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nouveau is an unusual install, not a norm. For one to diss an OS for not having it, especially when it's a third party software, is also unusual.

Snurg said:
But instead Meltdown, Spectre...for at least 1/2 more year.
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FreeBSD has a commit for this two days ago.

As far as that CoC goes, and I hate the mention of it, it's not the first time this sort of thing has come up here and I'd bet most of us have forgotten or never knew of it. This fluff will be forgotten in a few months, too.
Snurg said:
No wonder more and more users are considering systemdcide.
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Do you honestly think Linux or any other software group has fewer issues than FreeBSD does with such things? Do you honestly think a knowledgeable, technical person will switch OSes to something with the same and more issues?

Meanwhile, professional software engineers will continue as before and the number of people in the world who will consider switching due to this can probably be counted on your hands. And then they still won't.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
professional software engineers will continue as before
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This is my only gripe with your comment. Having a smooth desktop experience shouldn't require being a professional software engineer. A graphical desktop environment is not and has never been a first class citizen on FreeBSD. Other than that you're correct of course. Why bothering to give yourself even more headaches. I think Snurg's post unfortunately comes across as lamenting although it raises valid points with regard to desktop environments.

I for one love FreeBSD for most everything except my main work laptop. I think it would be fitting if more users were enabled to go full circle but I get that a graphical desktop is a very different beast to develop for than a single system application. Even more so in the context of a laptop computer which requires specialized hardware support, proper power management and lots of little optimizations that do not apply to workstations. It's probably also not a rewarding area to work in: either it works as expected or users are complaining. Very little "wow, that's cool" to be had there.
 
herrbischoff said:
Let me just say that all this paints a pretty drab picture of FreeBSD as a desktop operating system.
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I don't know, never tried using FreeBSD for a desktop. Although my attempts to use Linux as a desktop weren't very satisfying, which makes me think that FreeBSD would be no better, meaning not good enough.

But we should not jump to the conclusion that the picture of FreeBSD as a server operating system is drab.

Snurg said:
Yes, sadly you are right.
No nouveau. No hibernate.
But instead Meltdown, Spectre and CoC, for at least 1/2 more year.
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Don't care about nouveau or hibernate. My server never sleeps :)
The CoC doesn't make my server run faster or slower, not does it introduce bugs or features.
And I understand the risk of meltdown, spectre and friends, and I'm just as cool with it as I was 8 weeks ago when I didn't know.

We need to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
 
ralphbsz said:
Don't care about nouveau or hibernate.
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Me neither.

It's amazing how many people are using portable devices these days and considering that normal. So often we're talking apples and oranges when talking "desktop" because they fail to mention that they're not using a stationary computer - ie. what we used to call a desktop in the old days. I personally have no interest whatsoever in things like power saving, hibernating, and wireless stuff. So, my experence with FreeBSD on the desktop has very little relation to somebody's experience on a portable device like a laptop. To me a "desktop" is much like a server in that once turned on, I want it to stay that way. And indeed, that's the part that FreeBSD seems to be particularly good at.
 
The topic is about desktops, not servers...

To me it is just annoying how much electricity gets burnt by letting run the computers when they aren't being used.
In particular when these are power-hungry workstations. Thus hibernating overnight is a good thing to have.

The bug in the vesa kernel driver that breaks suspend/resume with Nvidia cards does not get fixed.
In spite of the fact that the FreeBSD devs know about it since years.
So Nvidia has no incentive to make their blob suspend-safe any longer.
Building a vesa.ko-less kernel does not help much any longer since driver 390.
Thus sleep suspend with Nvidia seens broken completely now with FreeBSD.
If FreeBSD had Nouveau, this probably won't be this way.

And running the computer overnight not only costs energy, but shortens the cleaning intervals substantially, too.
I do not like to have to rebuild the workplace with all these windows every day, no matter whether with desktop or laptop.
Thus hibernate, or at least suspend is a thing that I really want.

Because of these and the Meltspectre issues I have now installed systemDOS 4.15 on my second PC.
It has latest software, hibernates fine, has low latency with swappiness=0, and the .desktop files are complete.
That makes big difference for desktop usage.
 
Okay everyone. So ended my short stint with FreeBSD. But not completely... I might give in another go, once KDE4 is gone and KDE5 Plasma is in.
Mate was great, but I felt it lacking in a way in terms of aesthetics.
This is the thing about MacOS... Its a real Marmite operating system. There are those who love it and those who hate it.
MacOS' interface is a mix of Gnome and Mate with a bit of compiz in between.
When it comes to open source interfaces on Linux and BSD, the only interface that I can really like to use is KDE. This because it is so customizable that I can put all the things that I like of various interfaces in there to make my own.
I will admit that i3 has me intrigued, but seeing it in operation on Linux boxes, and having tried similar tiling setups on MacOS, I am a little hesitant. I'm not into the full tiling window managers. Fluxbox has me interested as well.

I think that I would give FreeBSD another try, once I have completely committed to what I interface I would like to run on it.
As far as the operating system itself, I was not having an easy time. I tried to copy a folder from my file server to the desktop and was having a hard time. It just was a folder with 20 .jpg files and it was taking like hours. MacOS does that in minutes.
In terms of installation, I followed the advice posted here. Don't really know what went wrong.
Maybe there is something that I'm missing.

Couple the "copying" issue and not being able to do what I wanted with the aesthetics of the system, I just gave up and went back to MacOS. This is reiterates my points in my previous post. The little things that happen behind the scenes that we take for granted.
 
Snurg said:
To me it is just annoying how much electricity gets burnt by letting run the computers when they aren't being used.
In particular when these are power-hungry workstations. Thus hibernating overnight is a good thing to have.
Click to expand...

No servers here, but I guess people have different ideas of "power-hungry". Not sure if dual core or I5 CPUs are in that category. In any case for my rural household with water pumps, refrigerators, many kilowatts of heaters, and stationary tools ranging to 5hp, the amount of electricity usage for a handful of computers is just not detectable on my hydro bill. Even if it was, I'd just be supplementing my heat in a positive manner. As for "cleaning", well this relatively dirty environment doesn't seem to cause any problems in my computer boxes. I just blow them out with compressed air when I change the motherboard, hard drives, or some such, every 5 years perhaps. Nothing wrong with being finicky about electricity usage and cleanliness for sure, but it serves little purpose in this environment. :)

That said, the bios slows the clock down progressively when there is little load. Nothing to do with my OS. But it certainly takes an annoying amount of time to get a computer monitor to respond on one box which runs Gnome. Even when I've been away for only a few minutes. I'm guessing the DE designers assumed that a monitor would be connected all the time, but I've used a KVM for 30 years now, so it's just what I'm used to. KDE has a setting to make the video respond on demand but Gnome seemingly has no such control and is thus difficult to use productively when switching between computers.
 
I do like what I see with Fluxbox. It could be the interface that I am looking for. The thing is that Fluxbox is just a window manager and not a full DE.
 

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Fluxbox, having been around for a long time, has lots of things written for it. It may be (untested by me, as I prefer window managers to DE's--just my personal taste and probably habit from long ago when computers were weaker) possible to make it into something approaching a desktop environment, though it would probably require some work. But for example, I'm sure you could add some sort of printing tool, network tool and so on, to run with fluxbox.
 
scottro said:
Fluxbox, having been around for a long time, has lots of things written for it. It may be (untested by me, as I prefer window managers to DE's--just my personal taste and probably habit from long ago when computers were weaker) possible to make it into something approaching a desktop environment, though it would probably require some work. But for example, I'm sure you could add some sort of printing tool, network tool and so on, to run with fluxbox.
Click to expand...

What other stuff would I need to install just to come close to a DE? Or better yet, what would I need to get something similar to what is in my two previous attachments? Could I just mix and match GTK and QT apps?
If I can get a list of items, that would be great.
 
Argh, I have no idea. :)
I guess you'd have to look at what you use now, and see. Some people want printing stuff, others want networking. Again, as I haven't used a desktop environment in so long, I can't give much help. And, I freely admit, creating such a list for yourself would be a lot of work.
 
Snurg said:
The topic is about desktops, not servers...
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Yes you're right. Everyone here should focus on the real problem.

I'm end user I don't want to play with i3, fluxbox, etc... The heavy and complete (bloatful) DE now stick with Linux, XFCE4 is modern enough and open to the BSD world, made a working system can be installed from live usb like Linux and work out of the box. It's all.
 
knightjp said:
Could I just mix and match GTK and QT apps?
Click to expand...
Exactly this is what I do.
I install Gnome, KDE, Mate, LXDE, Xfce, Thunderbird and a pack of browsers, Thunderbird, Gimp, LibreOffice and a bunch of other things, and on top of that I use FVWM as "desktop" with minimal annoyance factor.
That is, no screen goo like menu bars, icons and all that eeky stuff that distracts me from work. Just a pager to navigate between screens.
I have the same fvwm config for years. No waste of time tailoring the DMs this way
 
Snurg said:
Exactly this is what I do.
I install Gnome, KDE, Mate, LXDE, Xfce, Thunderbird and a pack of browsers, Thunderbird, Gimp, LibreOffice and a bunch of other things, and on top of that I use FVWM as "desktop" with minimal annoyance factor.
That is, no screen goo like menu bars, icons and all that eeky stuff that distracts me from work. Just a pager to navigate between screens.
I have the same fvwm config for years. No waste of time tailoring the DMs this way
Click to expand...
I don't like you. I choose the one I want and married with it, never change again (unless forced) and learn to use it in-dept.
 
giahung1997 said:
I choose the one I want and married with it, never change again (unless forced) and learn to use it in-dept.
Click to expand...
The reason why I just throw all these DM's onto a pile is that every one has its specialities, and for example if one wants multiple file managers open, sometimes one has to open alternative file managers (i.e. one of another DE) for that. And so I learn the differences of all these apps :)
 
Snurg said:
No nouveau. No hibernate
Click to expand...
I am happy with what I have on my laptop/box & would like to play around.
I can not improve the situation. Have faith in you and other dev's. contribution.

ralphbsz said:
We need to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater
Click to expand...
Sometime emotions plays over technical need. Distro hopping in linux world is bad trend. I spent lot of time with debian/devuan and now loyal to Freebsd. Instead of trying 10+ distro , lot of desktop wallpaper staff, it is better to spend some time on this forum & stick to one requirement at a time. Require fresh air.
(English is not my NL)
 
knightjp said:
If I can get a list of items, that would be great.
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https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/software-recommendatios-for-a-new-bie-system.63270/#post-365575

Snurg said:
No nouveau. No hibernate.
Click to expand...
Yes, it is really very sad, that such basic functionality like suspend, on OS from 2018,
is unavailable on some machines. As far as I know, suspend to RAM (suspend to disk
is unavailable on every graphic card…) works OK only when using Intel integrated graphics,
on my PC with Nvidia video card suspend doesn't work at all, while on my laptop with
Intel graphics it is working OK. Don't know nothing about AMD graphic cards, because
I've never tried to use it with FreeBSD.

That's beacause only few people are interested in FreeBSD as in a desktop OS,
even many FreeBSD developers do not use it on their desktops. Because many of them
are Apple®©™ employees and, I think, they don't want to help to create a competitor
to themselves in desktop OS market… I use FreeBSD as a desktop OS for years (since FreeBSD 10.0),
but nothing changed and won't change, I believe, may be it is time to switch…
 
Snurg said:
Exactly this is what I do.
I install Gnome, KDE, Mate, LXDE, Xfce, Thunderbird and a pack of browsers, Thunderbird, Gimp, LibreOffice and a bunch of other things, and on top of that I use FVWM as "desktop" with minimal annoyance factor.
That is, no screen goo like menu bars, icons and all that eeky stuff that distracts me from work. Just a pager to navigate between screens.
I have the same fvwm config for years. No waste of time tailoring the DMs this way
Click to expand...
I am assuming that you use something like i3 or Awesome or maybe Fluxbox itself.

In terms of the apps, I would tend to agree with you. If you are using any kind of open-source software, you do need to have a mixed bunch of apps. I can't believe I was stupid enough to even ask the question of mixing apps. For instance, kden-live is pretty much the best video editing software on the open source area. I will not debate on whether it is better than its proprietary counterparts (Final Cut / Premier), but if you are using for instance Linux, you need to install kden-live for video editing. That's a given. And Kden-live is a QT app. So even if you are using Gnome, you need QT libraries to run it. Gnome and GTK does not have anything like similar in their ranks. At least not to my knowledge. So yeah I would need to mix and match apps.

For now MacOS actually. Does what I need and it look cool enough I guess.
 
herrbischoff said:
Having a smooth desktop experience shouldn't require being a professional software engineer. A graphical desktop environment is not and has never been a first class citizen on FreeBSD.

*snip

Even more so in the context of a laptop computer which requires specialized hardware support, proper power management and lots of little optimizations that do not apply to workstations. It's probably also not a rewarding area to work in: either it works as expected or users are complaining. Very little "wow, that's cool" to be had there.
Click to expand...

I hardly qualify as a "software engineer" in any sense of the term.

I've never taken a computer class besides something I read online in my life, IIRC Texas Instruments came out the the pocket calculator when I was in high school, and everything I know about computers is from reading, or (mostly) trail and error.

I got a job in 1993 somewhere they had an APPLE II and taught myself to use it without ever having touched a computer before. My experience with menus in playing video games was instrumental in me figuring it out. When they upgraded to a new one I had to set it up and show them how to boot it up, as you had to flip-the-floppy during the boot process on this one.

But. I do have 5 laptops running FreeBSD, 2 OpenBSD and I really could not be happier with them or I would be using something else. I don't usually describe them as "smooth", I prefer rock solid. I do slightly prefer FreeBSD as a desktop as it seems more "polished" but that maybe due to familiarization. My configuration is maximized for my style of work and what I've found most efficient for me over time, though not for everybody

My OpenBSD W520 is considered a mobile workstation, or was when it was made. ;) My T61 are business class machines.

That said, I do run all Win7or Vista vintage machines so hardware compatibility is rarely an issue, but that's what I like and want to run. Vintage Thinkpads preferably. FreeBSD was fussy about Nvidia Optimus, but it ran out of the box with OpenBSD.

I haven't bought a brand new computer since my Sony Vaio in 2007 and it still faithfully serves me running i386 FreeBSD, but I try to let rest as much as possible.
 
ILUXA said:
... even many FreeBSD developers do not use it on their desktops. Because many of them are Apple®©™ employees and, I think, they don't want to help to create a competitor
to themselves in desktop OS market…
Click to expand...

Are a lot of Apple employees really FreeBSD developers? And if they really are, do they work on FreeBSD as part of their job? Are you saying that Apple supports FreeBSD by paying its employees to work on FreeBSD?

I know this happens in Linux, a lot. A lot of Linux work (in particular in the kernel) is done by people who are employees of companies such as HP, Oracle, IBM, LSI Logic (now called Avago/Broadcom), Mellanox, nVidia, and who do that work as part of their job. That's because these companies have a vested interest in Linux succeeding. But what would be Apple's interest in FreeBSD succeeding? While Mac OS was originally derived partly from FreeBSD (and partly from Mach, via the NeXT operating system that Steve Jobs brought along when he returned to Apple), I don't think more recent updates to FreeBSD help Apple in any way. The kernel has long forked from *BSD, and the userland (command-line) stuff they seem to do themselves (and it doesn't move very fast anyway).

Are you claiming that those FreeBSD developers are deliberately, and under orders from their employer Apple, working on FreeBSD, but deliberately not working on the GUI? That would be fantastically interesting; I think it's just an unlikely conspiracy theory.
 
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