The FreeBSD Desktop series are about creating efficient desktop environment on the FreeBSD system.
Why such series?
Because telling someone who wants FreeBSD desktop to buy Mac instead is like telling someone who wants Linux desktop to buy Windows because it has WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) inside.
This is one hell of a detailed and long series of articles – 21 of them. I’m not very well-versed in the world of BSD, and this series is making me want to give the world thing a go – just to learn and expand my horizons.
Some will find this review a little uncomfortable, it breaks some myths, which of course will be denied.
I can’t say I’ve ever had much joy in the FreeBSD space, over many attempts I’ve always hit driver roadblocks with my choice of hardware not matter what my starting point, old PowerBooks, generic PC, proprietary laptop, nothing has worked to the level of reliability or function that I expect.
I accept the blame for my BSD failures, but Linux made this soooooo much easier!
I’ve used BSD on the desktop a few times and the major takeaway was that at least in terms of ‘feel’, it just felt like I was using Linux but with a few extra roadblocks.
I appreciate that is a massive oversimplification of what BSD, but that’s the feeling I was left with.
Well that’s how it used to be, but Linux is slowly and surely creeping into the DE world and making it harder and harder to even run KDE or Gnome on anything else. Especially the Gnome people are eager to integrate the desktop with the underlying operating system by making Systemd a hard dependency everywhere possible. Wayland is also at least initially proving to be mostly focused on Linux, leaving the issues of platform-independence as a burden of BSD developers.
I believe that also porting graphics drivers from Linux to BSD is an increasingly painful job, making the drivers lack updates and therefore features. This is a big stumbling block for modern desktop environments that demand compositing and bug-free graphics stacks.
Graphics drivers aren’t really an issue for FreeBSD. A bigger issue for Wayland support is both systemd dependencies, and more than that, libinput. For whatever reason the maintainers aren’t accepting patches that make it work better with FreeBSD. It is
The whole narrative of “Linux creeping into the DE world” is backwards. More like BSDs have been creeping out of the DE world.
These series are meant to be as detailed as they can be.
For example if you only have the graphics driver i915kms.ko from graphics/drm-kmod package then you do not need any configuration at all to start 3D accelerated X11 server. But if – like me – you would like to disable CAPS LOCK key, set preferred keyboard layout, enable CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE chosrtcut to reset the X11 server and so on, these are where this content is useful.
Using Openbox I do not prefer to have several additional daemons running in the background just to be able to switch keyboard layout later or for other settings. The X11 config files is the place where I set these settings and forget about them.
I like to configure things my own way, even if it takes little more time doing so because t will save me a lot of time later, most people prefer reverse approach, to have something usable fast even if it will not suit them and then they waste time each time they want to use that thing because its not setup for their preference.
Not sure if I described it best way as English is not my native language but I hope you get the idea.
Keep in mind that Ubuntu like versions of FreeBSD exist and they are named GhostBSD and NomadBSD.
FreeBSD would be good if it shipped on tailored hardware.
Couldn’t they just… package the whole thing into an iso image?
They did actually, its called GhostBSD and NomadBSD and they are both FreeBSD based.
Ah – some useful information in this series of articles. Thanks for writing about it.
Welcome, I am glad that someone finds them useful.
Nice, I will say I know first hand from too many saying use a Mac or WSL instead of BSD / Linux. Then also hear how sed on the mac is different and then laugh.
After a quick skim through the article and the section about task bars I realize how much I dislike them. Now mind you, the first GUI I evsr used was the GEM desktop on the Atari ST, and the Amiga Workbench. Then Win95. I am more used to not having a task bar and knowing what tasks are running via other means. Niw with having used Gnome for many years, I enjoy that default Gnome doesn’t have a permanent dock showing on the screen all the time! I use it to launch my normal few programs I happen to be using at the time, how many people really need this huge list of all the things running, and taking up screen real estate?
Sorry, early morning rant on how I hate MacOS. :p
I also used Amiga Workbench in the past and I understand what you mean about precious screen space … and I generally agree – especially lately when lots of these graphical interfaces are a lot too large and they take definitely too much space.
That is why I made that compromise – to sacrifice 30 top pixels on the whole width of the screen to have all the information I need 🙂
The ‘bottom’ Plank dock that is also described in the series is optional and I do not use it at all. It can also can be placed on the side of the screen instead of bottom and it also supports ‘autohide’ to not permanently waste screen space.