

Ask HN: How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? - Alpinweis

After reading the recent posts on how people use their Mac and Dell/Windows I was just wondering if there is any one using FreeBSD as a desktop OS and how they use it. After being a Windows user for years I am now a FreeBSD/OpenBSD intermediate user interested in finding guru's advise on proper ways of using it.
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jd
Not a guru, but I've used it for a while. Both as desktop and server. My main
gripe is that FreeBSD doesn't have a reliable filesystem. FreeBSD still dies
pretty horribly after a few hard crashes (power loss, whatever).

fsck? In 2008? No thanks. Messages about possibly corrupted inodes? How should
that be my problem? I can't stress this enough, one day you will wake up and
FreeBSD _will_ refuse to boot. And that day will, by Murphy's Law, be one of
those days where you have to get an incredible amount of real work done.

I'm a big fan of FreeBSD, ports, and the whole "do it right" and "proper
documentation" philosophy. But until they get journalling right you should
probably stay away.

(also: upgrading from FreeBSD 6.x to 6.(x+1) is incredibly painful. I don't
think upgrading a 7.x system is going to be much easier. Reinstalling FreeBSD
gets old fast, so you'll probably just shrug and stick with whatever version
you already have)

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sjs382
ZFS has a freebsd port.

~~~
jd
Experimental.

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takumish
I use FreeBSD at work and home. Its nice to have an identical setup on the
laptop and colo. When I want to deploy something, I make a package file on the
dev box and simply install it on the server. Desktop: window manager:
ratpoison browser: firefox editor: emacs email: mew (runs in emacs)

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silentbicycle
Using it "on the desktop" is quite vague. What would you use your computer
for? Somebody who wants a computer for checking email, shopping on ebay, and
playing flash games is going to have different requirements than somebody who
wants to make electronic music or do heavy video editing.

Have you looked at the FreeBSD Handbook?
(<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/>) That will probably answer
many of your questions. Also, the OpenBSD FAQ: <http://openbsd.org/faq/>

I've used OpenBSD on the desktop and servers for over five years. I mostly use
it for programming (Emacs), playing music (mpd: <http://mpd.wikia.com/>), and
nethack. I use Firefox and w3m for web stuff, dwm as a window manager,
mercurial for vc, etc.

OpenBSD's focus on security keeps the core system simple, well documented, and
straightforward to configure, so as to minimize the amount of obscure things
that could lead to vulnerabilities. FreeBSD is also an _excellent_ OS, but
OpenBSD's clean and minimalistic design is more my style.

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samuel
I don't use it as desktop OS anymore, but I used to during the 4.x branch.
Most of those days annoyances are now gone like having to recompile java from
source or using linux binaries of Mozilla/Firefox for flash (this may still
apply).

I don't think it's very different from using a non ultrapolished Linux
distro(like Debian). Choose your WM, install bash or (pd)ksh(tcsh sucks) and
your prefered tools(Eclipse, LaTeX, Emacs, OOffice... whatever) and you're
ready to work. I don't like GNU userland so for me that was a plus, but some
people can't live without colored ls and a several megs vi, so your mileage
may vary.

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cperciva
I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop.

Desktop environment: KDE3.

Text editor: kwrite.

Office suite: OpenOffice.

Web browser: Konqueror for most sites, Firefox for a few sites which don't
work in Konqueror.

Email: Thunderbird.

Other communications: Kopete (for ICQ), aMSN (for MSN), ksirc (for IRC).

System administration tools: FreeBSD Update for base system security updates;
Portsnap for updating the ports tree; portupgrade for updating installed
ports; tarsnap (of course!) for backups.

~~~
apu
Any particular reason you prefer Konqueror to Firefox? Do you feel it's
faster?

~~~
cperciva
Two reasons: First, it does feel faster. Second, I don't have flash enabled in
konqueror, which makes some websites far less obnoxious.

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bayareaguy
About 10 years ago I started using a colocated FreeBSD system as the central
location for all my email so the "desktop" that matters to me is whatever ssh
window happens to have the screen session where my mh-emacs process is
running.

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gaius
I'm not sure it makes sense to use FreeBSD on the desktop. Not that it isn't
perfectly capable mind, but if you want a BSD desktop or laptop there's OSX.
I've FreeBSD running in a VirtualBox VM; best of all possible worlds.

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hs
i used to use FreeBSD until the pain kills me (had to rebuild kernel to
activate nat)

openbsd generic kernel covers almost everything i need (no bluetooth support)
- for complete hw support, i use ubuntu

overall, openbsd is simpler. Last week i just upgraded from 4.0 to 4.4 on
remote machine in about 2-3 hours). I never bothered to upgrade before :D 400+
days uptime is normal

for desktop, i use dwm, firefox3, mrxvt, qiv, axyftp, vifm, vim (non-gui),
mpg123, mplayer, ImageMagick, gimp, lighttpd, mercurial, newlisp,
tightvncviewer (to control my Mac Mini GUI remotely)

~~~
cperciva
_had to rebuild kernel to activate nat_

That hasn't been necessary for the past 3 years.

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pogos
Xorg + fluxbox

emacs22

Firefox

And WIN4BSD when I need to test my work in IE or other Windows browsers.

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drhowarddrfine
I use FreeBSD for desktop and laptop. Never crashes in the four years I've
been doing that. Anything I used to do on Windows I can do on fbsd. The only
issue is Flash on web sites. Most of that is just ads so I don't miss it but
the few videos I'd like to watch I can download and view them offline.

It's no different than running a Linux desktop and you are running the same
software. The question is a little strange to me.

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sabat
I don't. FreeBSD is dying. Haven't you heard?

