Why do you use FreeBSD on desktop?

zirias@ said:
But, still a nice opportunity to remind everyone that every port (unless it's a candidate for removal because nobody uses it) deserves to be maintained 😏 Come on, adopt one
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Is there a easy way to get a list of the installed ports that doesn't have a maintainer?
 
jb82 said:
You guys who use FreeBSD as a daily driver on desktops.
Just curious, why you've picked FreeBSD instead of Linux, Mac...? […]
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For me it is just a matter of avoiding a (too) heterogenous environment: I chose FreeBSD for servers; then I do not want to maintain Linux desktops at the same time. I would not have chosen FreeBSD as desktops alone if it had not been for the servers.

BobSlacker said:
Is there a easy way to get a list of the installed ports that doesn't have a maintainer?
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Yes, it is an example in pkg-query(8)
Bash: 
# List unmaintained packages:
pkg query -e '%m = ports@FreeBSD.org' %o
 
BobSlacker said:
Is there a easy way to get a list of the installed ports that doesn't have a maintainer?
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Some slacker missed the sticky....

forums.freebsd.org

Adopt an orphaned port project

Since the ports tree is now open again, let's start the "Adopt an orphaned port" project. What is it? According to http://freshports.org/ we currently have 23,940 ports in our tree, that's really great! But: There are 4,751 unmaintained ports (approx. 20%), that need your love. What can I do...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
why I use freebsd on desktop on my cyberdeck to be quite frank it allows me to run any main line environments or managers I want , but I landed icewm because it clones and minics and i dare say does more for mention systems , what i am used windows in particular win 95 and ibm os/2 back thoses days. also being a unix virgin nay freebsd virgin there were several reinstalls but the A5 9000 dragon balls and tos star trek references there that my cyberdeck.I learn to install a login manager slim , tea an text editor , i have kde meta games pack thunar file manger mate calculator, several x11 programs, with libreoffice and gimp , emacs devotee here, dr racket, of course firefox and thunderbird. on the performance side freebsd performs lightyears ahead of unbuntu desktop or mate. its after a 1:16 minute init sequence runs very well for arm version faster than ubuntu arm it seems to processing faster near my main i7 asus win10 which is obsolete but still fast , freebsd is very rock solid performing system . which i use more, to be frank with you freebsd is simple and straight forward to install runs fast and its repositories although monolithic got what you need. actually i perfer monlithic all in one systems . I heard about arch and gentoo they are great and all but i dont need a rolling release os nor i want to go down a pathway to abilities that many find unnatural nor sacrifice several cpus to dark tech gods to have optimize system i kid about that. in all seriousness though freebsd is an excellent system either command line or desktop format that i dont have to manage too much and the commands i familiar to me its similiar forgive me cough dos although dos took much from unix. its been several years communing with the command line
i dont mind because of dos 1.0 to 6.2 its like coming back home . as for unix being arcane well now it seem not so rough. i close by saying a quote "to think i hesitated " cenobite channard hellraiser 2.
 
Use It on desktops and laptops as a daily driver. Runs everything I need (stable), even as an IT support engineer.

Jails are bloody amazing when used for developing, separate jails for different database servers, separate jails for different web servers and php versions, without poluting main system with all that crap.

ZFS file system is great for snapshots and sending backups.

Boot environments are also awesome.

I do youtube stuff as well, all done on freebsd with obs and kdenlive
 
I can't even remember why I started using FreeBSD. The first version was 4.something. I guess I was just tired of trying various Linux versions and just accidentally ran into FreeBSD and never looked back. It does what it needs to do, has enough desktop applications and is stable enough (and when it's not stable it's probably me and not the system is to blame).
 
shkhln said:
Please keep in mind, sandboxing (via FreeBSD jails) is planned but not implemented yet.
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what's the diff between a sandbox and a jail? I thought they were just different implementations of the same idea? 😲

According to this source, a JVM running a Java applet is an example of a sandbox... You can tweak a jail to have similar features/functions/restrictions... Or, you can sandbox different browser tabs... heck, even limits(1) can be thought of as a sandboxing mechanism...

The way I see it, jails already offer the tools for sandboxing (just edit /etc/jails.conf as needed)...
 
astyle said:
Plasma 5.27 has them, and I actually like them... I didn't like those menus in GNOME, but KDE pulled the idea off pretty nice, IMHO.

Now, to answer the OP:

It's because I like KDE... and on FreeBSD, there's very minimal config done for you, it's mostly a DIY thing. And I like that - Same great desktop as on Linux, but much more sensible underpinnings, very easy to learn and set up the way I like. I like Konsole, Dolphin, and other KDE utilities... and the FreeBSD underpinnings that they give easy access to. ZFS, in my mind, is probably the coolest feature...

oh, and I did manage to get Wayland on FreeBSD going on an RX 6900 XT, but haven't tried the network transparency part of it...
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Are you actually using plasma-wayland ? How are you achieving this?
 
Just cannot think of a reason as why not... And I think it all boils down to if it suits you. FreeBSD does everything I want. And typically, I don't use any of the main desktop environments, I use emwm, and it's sufficient for what I do. I mean daily coding. And now I'm transitioning into cybersecurity, I'm still using FreeBSD to do all the things. I don't believe it will fail me. Having the whole system rsnapshot regularly provides extra guarantee. For me, kinda perfect.
 
tuxador said:
Are you actually using plasma-wayland ? How are you achieving this?
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Ahhh... I pulled things together using random bits of info back when the sienna cichlid graphics driver was new... and instructions from ADG's euroquis.nl blog (yes, including caveats and pitfalls) applied. Unfortunately, I haven't touched that rig since then - real life got in the way.

I do know that since then, things did improve, and devs got their ducks in a row - but that's just from reading stuff on the Internet, not even playing with it.
 
astyle said:
Ahhh... I pulled things together using random bits of info back when the sienna cichlid graphics driver was new... and instructions from ADG's euroquis.nl blog (yes, including caveats and pitfalls) applied. Unfortunately, I haven't touched that rig since then - real life got in the way.

I do know that since then, things did improve, and devs got their ducks in a row - but that's just from reading stuff on the Internet, not even playing with it.
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Not sure if Adrian's sh script still works
 

Why do you use FreeBSD on desktop?​

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Good question, especially with a plethora of reasons not to. I guess force of habit. Change is hard.
But honestly it offers a sense of safety and real value- Due to its near-zero telemetry and ability to close all open ports with ease without having to rely upon a firewall to do that job. ipconfig and "arp -s " still work and exist by default. Overall, every other OS seems like a nightmare.
 
quakerdoomer said:
Good question, especially with a plethora of reasons not to. I guess force of habit. Change is hard.
But honestly it offers a sense of safety and real value- Due to its near-zero telemetry and ability to close all open ports with ease without having to rely upon a firewall to do that job. ipconfig and "arp -s " still work and exist by default. Overall, every other OS seems like a nightmare.
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What about that wonderful sendmail? :cool:
 
I have lot's of reasons but I am flexible. Used Linux for some 20 years and like others stated it is not consistent. Nor is BSD imho. A desktop is just a set of tools that allows you to do things in a preferred way.

To be honest, for any serious work I tend to work with scripting simply since a gui, any guy, never has all of the tools I need.
As a side joke. In the office we had some challenges once in a while. Like build a filter based on xyz in the logfiles. Represent it in a special way where even managers grasped what it was :)

Now ask that to a windows or desktop user ....
 
Hmm, I think I chose it for my desktops because they are pretty old and needed a minimal system that I could then configure and build up rapidly enough before my attention span expired.

FreeBSD installs the base minimal system, then ports are available and whatever needs to be running is easily turned on or off in /etc/rc.conf

The other thing is that FreeBSD connects to Wifi during the boot process, whereas Linux typically leaves that until Network Manager Applet or whatever fires up when the user has logged into their graphical environment. This is important because I'm a serial killer of package managers. I've lost countless Linux installs by doing apt-get/yum install <some_package> and then it uninstalls either dpkg or rpm, or something that the GUI needs, and as such the network connection is lost and you're left with hours of trying to sort broken packages before I lose my temper and format the disk.

To be fair to Linux in this regard, pkg is currently dead on my system but I still have the ports to build and update user packages as necessary (with the network connection independent of the GUI), and none of them have tried to force me to downgrade my kernel version in order to upgrade Chromium to get the annoying "Can't update" banner to sod off.

I'm sure you can configure Linux to operate in the same way regarding the Wifi connection, but it's too boring to research.
 
For me, the reason I use a FreeBSD desktop was that the linux kernel 0.99 really sucked in 1995. The frequent panics resulting in trashed extfs caused me to look for alternatives. Back then the choice of desktops were UNIX, Linux, or BSD desktop, an OS/2 desktop, or Windows NT 3.5. I had just moved from an IBM mainframe position to a position in the Open Systems Group and wanted to use at home something similar to what I was managing at work.

Back then a person had to build a GUI environment from scratch. There were no Linux distros, except SLS, Slackware, and Yaggrisil. I tried Slack and Yaggrisil, while SLS was too much putzing around -- I worked with the creator of SLS. It was good if you had Linux experience then, and I was too new to UNIX and my 19 years of mainframe experience counted for nothing in the UNIX world.

Since then I've used fvwm, Gnome 2, KDE (hated it), Gnome 3 (hated it) a commercial version of CDE for FreeBSD, back to fvwm, mwm, and now CDE, the last three of which I maintain for FreeBSD.

I use CDE now because it was the first desktop environment I used when I joined the Open Systems Group, when they plunked a DEC Alpha 3000 on my desk. I liked CDE then and it still suits me. Call me a throwback.

I do miss dtmail, an MH based email app on OSF/1 and Tru64. dxmail, which was on Solaris 9, never really cut it for me. I've searched for dtmail sources but none can be found, else I'd port it to FreeBSD.
 
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