will freebsd15 have default desktop?

GlitchyDot said:
Oh, i have T61 with middleton bios and 8gb ram - one day i will try this :D .... i dont recall which laptop i used. tp x1y g1 or p71 (xeon and 332gb ram) or x220 but it took 24 at least to build firefox. :D
Click to expand...
I have x61 w. FreeBSD 14. Took 24 hours?
 
No, I don't think so. That would make it a non-general purpose operating system. The best thing FreeBSD can do is to add laptop and game controller/audio/scientific controller support. At that point, the base ISO will scretch beyond 1GB.

Open source desktop burden is mostly happening at freedesktop project from RHEL but NetBSD has to say something on it (highly opinionated):

Desktop infrastructure

wiki.netbsd.org wiki.netbsd.org

It applies to FreeBSD too
 
fr0xk said:
No, I don't think so. That would make it a non-general purpose operating system. The best thing FreeBSD can do is to add laptop and game controller/audio/scientific controller support.
Click to expand...
Agreed. Plus, the only desktop that works fairly flawlessly on FreeBSD is CDE (due to lacking the "hard bits" like network management entirely). So I doubt those looking for a beautifully engaging home desktop experience with have their dreams answered with that.
 
kpedersen said:
Plus, the only desktop that works fairly flawlessly on FreeBSD is CDE
Click to expand...
Glad you specified "desktop" :) My WindowMaker environment works flawlessly too.
So yes, a bit of sarcasm/smarta**ery but I'm trying to point out the big difference between a WindowManager (WM) and a Desktop Environment (DE).
Both have the same appearance of "graphical environment, multiple windows you can muck around with".
DE's have a WM component, but they try to give graphical everything and do everything, but a good WM simply "manages windows".
Old school people often feel a DE is bloated and a lot of "why", at least I feel that way. A DE can bring consistency with look/feel like fonts, colors all adjusted in a single place, but typically only works with "DE applications" (think about terminal windows: xterm, gterm, kterm, etc). A WM you tweak things in .Xresources.

My opinion, agree disagree, tell me I'm full of it, all good. I think a good WM that behaves the way a user wants is about all most people need (yes I understand some people like the spinny whirling flashing shiny things that most DEs provide, but I'm talking about functionality)
 
kpedersen said:
Agreed. Plus, the only desktop that works fairly flawlessly on FreeBSD is CDE (due to lacking the "hard bits" like network management entirely). So I doubt those looking for a beautifully engaging home desktop experience with have their dreams answered with that.
Click to expand...
I use XFCE with FreeBSD and my experience is as good as can be. It works just perfectly in every detail on my laptop.
 
I've used a bunch of different desktop environments on FreeBSD over the last ~ 30 years. They all work. Your choice of desktop depends on your preference. Just pick one and (pkg) install it. There's even a port/pkg that helps you set up a DE.

Unlike most Linux distros which come with a fixed DE, you can choose your DE. Instead of hopping from one distro to another, like a lot of people do, because the DE sucks, you can install one or more DEs on the same machine. I have a number of DEs installed so that when people ask about my FreeBSD laptop, like at OpenHack, I can log out of my current DE (CDE) and sign in using a different one.

BTW, Gnome sucks on FreeBSD just as badly as it does on any Linux distro. You have the same experience with the DE as you would on any Linux distro.
 
cy@ said:
BTW, Gnome sucks on FreeBSD just as badly as it does on any Linux distro. You have the same experience with the DE as you would on any Linux distro.
Click to expand...
I generally disagree (other than Gnome sucks). Gnome specifically is missing many standard components and regularly discharges a bunch of core dump files in the home directory. The audio integration also seemed to be off.

Multi-sessions over i.e VNC also tend to interact poorly (generally due to dbus being a little unpolished too).

That said, I did test this last a year or so ago, but I can't imagine it has improved much in the mean time.
 
mer said:
Glad you specified "desktop" :) My WindowMaker environment works flawlessly too.
So yes, a bit of sarcasm/smarta**ery but I'm trying to point out the big difference between a WindowManager (WM) and a Desktop Environment (DE).
Click to expand...
Absolutely. I also highly recommend sticking to lighter window managers. Less crap to break (or maintain yourself once upstream loses interest).

FreeBSD aside, I don't think any open-source desktop environment will ever truely receive enough polish to make it suitable for the masses. The volatile approach of the Linux ecosystem is almost mutually exclusive to this goal.

Its been many decades now and in many ways desktop environments are struggling to reach feature parity with Gnome 1.x and KDE 2.x. In the standard install, I would even suggest that Gnome 3 is less featureful than the Windows 3.1 desktop.
 
mer said:
My opinion, agree disagree, tell me I'm full of it, all good. I think a good WM that behaves the way a user wants is about all most people need
Click to expand...
Yep, that is how I have been rolling ever since FreeBSD became my desktop OS too. Just me and x11-wm/bspwm. If I feel fancy I slap x11/polybar on top of that.
Personally, I fail to understand the appeal of a desktop environment. I just need a way of organizing a bunch of windows and that's it. Polybar is just icing on the cake.

and:
kpedersen said:
Absolutely. I also highly recommend sticking to lighter window managers. Less crap to break (or maintain yourself once upstream loses interest).
Click to expand...
Hence I'm the maintainer of the above ports :p
 
jbo@ said:
Personally, I fail to understand the appeal of a desktop environment. I just need a way of organizing a bunch of windows and that's it.
Click to expand...
"Me too". Is it a pain to tweak .Xresources for consistent look/feel? Sure. Is it hard? No.
 
kpedersen said:
FreeBSD aside, I don't think any open-source desktop environment will ever truely receive enough polish to make it suitable for the masses.
Click to expand...
Dunno, KDE comes close enough to keep me happy. When I started on Linux back in college, KDE already had the kind of visual polish that made it comparable to what the masses were already used to on Windoze. It does help to have a conceptual separation of GUI and what's underneath, and KDE actually showed that the separation concept is possible to achieve in code (unlike Windows, at the time). KDE is what kept me going on FreeBSD. I have to admit, if FreeBSD did not have KDE in ports, I would have stuck to Linux a bit longer.
 
jbo@ said:
I don't even know what you're talking about - I don't have a ~/.Xresources :D
Click to expand...
Ha.
.Xresources is the old standard X way of defining things, properties for different clients. Example: xterm background, foreground colors, xterm font.
for basic window managers, one needs to add info for all different applications. That's where a DE comes in, it does things "standard" so all applications should pick the values up.

Most applications store defaults in $HOME/.config/application but the Xresources will override.
 
Yeah I just don't care enough to even bother setting that up.

As I have never done it I can't say for sure but I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if some random application finds a way to do things in a non-standard manner and then suddenly the .Xresources approach doesn't work and you're again spending 12 hours trying to figure out how to work around that.
 
  • Like
Reactions: mer
astyle said:
Dunno, KDE comes close enough to keep me happy. When I started on Linux back in college, KDE already had the kind of visual polish that made it comparable to what the masses were already used to on Windoze.
Click to expand...
Did it even have an add/remove user utility? If I recall, that kept breaking a lot; even on Linux.

Obviously the command line is the way to do that but I still can't classify a desktop environment near "complete" unless it supports stuff like that.
 
jbo@ said:
Yeah I just don't care enough to even bother setting that up.

As I have never done it I can't say for sure but I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if some random application finds a way to do things in a non-standard manner and then suddenly the .Xresources approach doesn't work and you're again spending 12 hours trying to figure out how to work around that.
Click to expand...
All new toolkits do their own thing, storing settings in ~/.config/ somewhere. None of this is documented. You need to rely on whatever config app is used by your DE or by the app.

.Xresources is what Xt, Xaw, Xm, and other legacy toolkits use for settings. Yeah, some provided an app while others expected the user to edit them. Either way they documented their resources and one could edit them by hand.

With the new tookits, qt and gtk, and the newer DEs, each did their own thing and none of it was documented. Either use the app provided or google for how to edit the settings in ~/.config/ for your app.

To me it's a step in the wrong direction but then again so was Linux. Files aren't in the same places we expected them on any regular UNIX system. Muddle around and see what works.
 
kpedersen said:
Absolutely. I also highly recommend sticking to lighter window managers. Less crap to break (or maintain yourself once upstream loses interest).
Click to expand...
When I was Linux distro hopping, I tried a few DEs out but eventually stuck with GNOME since it was the most consistent across distros.

I prefer Xfce though since it just-works pretty well! And it was relatively easy to get up-and-running on FreeBSD (install Xorg, GPU module/driver, then Xfce, then startx but even lightdm was easy). Out-the-box minimal Xfce on FreeBSD also looked better (more modern/sleek?) than openSUSE's Xfce.
 
kpedersen said:
Did it even have an add/remove user utility? If I recall, that kept breaking a lot; even on Linux.

Obviously the command line is the way to do that but I still can't classify a desktop environment near "complete" unless it supports stuff like that.
Click to expand...
Off the top of my head, I do recall KDE 3 having a kuser utility... Yeah, it was not the most reliable thing, but that did not make or break my DE experience.

To me, a DE needs to offer visually convenient ways to organize files - properly working drag-and-drop, sorting files by date or something else, looking at stuff side-by-side - and yeah, not crash if I do something weird with the mouse. Yeah, command-line has its merits, and needs to be easily available, but eye candy has its place. KDE is my go-to, but there's a pretty obvious proliferation of DEs and WMs in the Open Source world, they can be configured for just about anything the user likes, we even have a Screenshots thread (Thread freebsd-screen-shots.8877) as a demonstration of that point.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top