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How Is FreeBSD on the Desktop These Days?
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Aaron Baugher
Dec 11, 2011, 8:11:47 AM12/11/11
to
I'm looking for opinions on using FreeBSD (especially amd64) on a
desktop workstation, specifically for web programming, meaning that I
need a browser that works correctly, including Flash (fortunately Flash
seems on the way out, but it's not there yet). I'd also like to be able
to do some video editing, and I like compiz (with some 3D effects) as a
window manager. So in general, how is FreeBSD for a desktop these days?
I'm fine with the old text installer; I'm only concerned with desktop
functionality and apps on the running system.
Here's the whole story: I was a pure FreeBSD user for several years,
after switching from Linux. On the server, FreeBSD simply can't be
beat, and I still use it there. But a couple years ago, I was getting
frustrated with the fact that Adobe's Flash plugin for FreeBSD was
always a version or two behind the Linux one, and especially on 64-bit
it was unreliable. (Stupid closed-source Adobe's fault, not FreeBSD's.)
There were some other annoyances: Adobe Air seemed to be becoming
popular, and it didn't work well either. OpenOffice had an issue with
the spellchecker not working, though I can't remember if that was
FreeBSD specific. Seems like I also ran into trouble getting an onboard
network card to work. There were also conversations on this newsgroup
at the time about how the ports tree was getting awfully large and
developing dependency issues like the Linuxes tend to have in their
binary package managers. I got to a point where I felt like I needed to
wipe my system and start over anyway.
So I switched to Ubuntu (Xubuntu, actually), and I was pretty happy with
it for a while. I missed the ports tree and some favorite utilities
(why no cpdup on Linux?), but Flash was pretty solid, and I was able to
get my work done. I've never come to *like* Linux as much as FreeBSD,
though. It tries a little too hard to abstract things away from me, and
nothing aggravates me more than not being able to do something like
configure a network card because a problem with the window manager has
wiped out the icon for it. I feel like there's more installed and
running on the system that I'm not aware of, and it's not as good at
logging things I need to know. I'm just much happier with FreeBSD's way
of doing things.
On top of that, Ubuntu has developed its own issues, at least on my
system. If you don't stay right up on the latest version, you tend to
get old versions of third-party software too. On FreeBSD, if a port
won't compile unless you upgrade the OS, you'll find that out when you
install it. But on Ubuntu, you just get whatever old version the
repository last offered for your OS version. I don't blame them for not
keeping up on older versions of everything, but when I'm only one
upgrade behind, it doesn't seem like it should make as big a difference
as it does.
And now Flash has started working poorly. About 1/3 of the time I load
a YouTube page, the video is gray (Flash fails completely) or the audio
plays to a black background. Other sites with Flash cause the plugin to
die or lock the browser up for a while. In addition to that, there's
some weirdness with the menus in XFCE4 and compiz, where I have to mouse
over a menu item twice to get its submenu to show up. Tooltips in all
apps are the same way, and a bug report on that has been languishing for
a year. And to top things off, now I'm getting spontaneous reboots,
with nothing at all reported in any log. They're happening when the
screensaver wakes up, and I've tried having it do nothing but blank the
screen, or don't blank the screen and just play a (non-3D) screensaver,
to no avail, so I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware thing.
So I'd really, really, really like to switch back. Any encouragement or
warnings?
Thanks,
--
Aaron -- aaron.baugher.biz
desktop workstation, specifically for web programming, meaning that I
need a browser that works correctly, including Flash (fortunately Flash
seems on the way out, but it's not there yet). I'd also like to be able
to do some video editing, and I like compiz (with some 3D effects) as a
window manager. So in general, how is FreeBSD for a desktop these days?
I'm fine with the old text installer; I'm only concerned with desktop
functionality and apps on the running system.
Here's the whole story: I was a pure FreeBSD user for several years,
after switching from Linux. On the server, FreeBSD simply can't be
beat, and I still use it there. But a couple years ago, I was getting
frustrated with the fact that Adobe's Flash plugin for FreeBSD was
always a version or two behind the Linux one, and especially on 64-bit
it was unreliable. (Stupid closed-source Adobe's fault, not FreeBSD's.)
There were some other annoyances: Adobe Air seemed to be becoming
popular, and it didn't work well either. OpenOffice had an issue with
the spellchecker not working, though I can't remember if that was
FreeBSD specific. Seems like I also ran into trouble getting an onboard
network card to work. There were also conversations on this newsgroup
at the time about how the ports tree was getting awfully large and
developing dependency issues like the Linuxes tend to have in their
binary package managers. I got to a point where I felt like I needed to
wipe my system and start over anyway.
So I switched to Ubuntu (Xubuntu, actually), and I was pretty happy with
it for a while. I missed the ports tree and some favorite utilities
(why no cpdup on Linux?), but Flash was pretty solid, and I was able to
get my work done. I've never come to *like* Linux as much as FreeBSD,
though. It tries a little too hard to abstract things away from me, and
nothing aggravates me more than not being able to do something like
configure a network card because a problem with the window manager has
wiped out the icon for it. I feel like there's more installed and
running on the system that I'm not aware of, and it's not as good at
logging things I need to know. I'm just much happier with FreeBSD's way
of doing things.
On top of that, Ubuntu has developed its own issues, at least on my
system. If you don't stay right up on the latest version, you tend to
get old versions of third-party software too. On FreeBSD, if a port
won't compile unless you upgrade the OS, you'll find that out when you
install it. But on Ubuntu, you just get whatever old version the
repository last offered for your OS version. I don't blame them for not
keeping up on older versions of everything, but when I'm only one
upgrade behind, it doesn't seem like it should make as big a difference
as it does.
And now Flash has started working poorly. About 1/3 of the time I load
a YouTube page, the video is gray (Flash fails completely) or the audio
plays to a black background. Other sites with Flash cause the plugin to
die or lock the browser up for a while. In addition to that, there's
some weirdness with the menus in XFCE4 and compiz, where I have to mouse
over a menu item twice to get its submenu to show up. Tooltips in all
apps are the same way, and a bug report on that has been languishing for
a year. And to top things off, now I'm getting spontaneous reboots,
with nothing at all reported in any log. They're happening when the
screensaver wakes up, and I've tried having it do nothing but blank the
screen, or don't blank the screen and just play a (non-3D) screensaver,
to no avail, so I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware thing.
So I'd really, really, really like to switch back. Any encouragement or
warnings?
Thanks,
--
Aaron -- aaron.baugher.biz
Andrew Reilly
Dec 12, 2011, 6:06:42 AM12/12/11
to
On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:11:47 -0600, Aaron Baugher wrote:
> (why no cpdup on Linux?)
I've been using FreeBSD since about '92 and I've not come across cpdup.
I've just found it in the ports tree (not the base), and it sounds
remarkably similar to rsync. Does it have any compelling advantages over
rsync, which is nearly ubiquitous these days?
On the main question, I'm afraid I can't answer. There was an issue of
BSDMag a month or so ago on the subject, and the PCBSD "distribution"
seems to be FreeBSD with desktop stuff added, so it is clearly possible.
I'm afraid that my last FreeBSD desktop decommissioned itself a little
under a year ago and I haven't had the time or inclination to re-
establish it. Instead I have a headless FreeBSD server and a Mac
laptop. Not quite satisfactory, but for different reasons than FreeBSD.
Pan, libre-office and vim are as near to identical as matters to me, and
Mail.app is arguably better than claws-mail, so I'm mostly happy. Flash
works on the Mac but you can turn it off. When I stopped using the
FreeBSD desktop I think that Flash still didn't work, but that seemed
like a good thing. Clearly one's milage can vary on that subject.
These days I run Ubuntu from time to time in a VM, and it is certainly
slick and easy, but it isn't always right (I have grim file system
coherence problems with the vmware directory sharing thing that requires
frequent unmount/remount cycles to resolve.) It's nice that several
commercial tool-chains support Linux as dev platforms now, annoying and
weird that they don't support Mac, given that their tools are all either
command-line or eclipse plugins... FreeBSD's linux compatability would
probably be good enough to swing that one, so maybe I'll switch back...
Cheers,
--
Andrew
> (why no cpdup on Linux?)
I've been using FreeBSD since about '92 and I've not come across cpdup.
I've just found it in the ports tree (not the base), and it sounds
remarkably similar to rsync. Does it have any compelling advantages over
rsync, which is nearly ubiquitous these days?
On the main question, I'm afraid I can't answer. There was an issue of
BSDMag a month or so ago on the subject, and the PCBSD "distribution"
seems to be FreeBSD with desktop stuff added, so it is clearly possible.
I'm afraid that my last FreeBSD desktop decommissioned itself a little
under a year ago and I haven't had the time or inclination to re-
establish it. Instead I have a headless FreeBSD server and a Mac
laptop. Not quite satisfactory, but for different reasons than FreeBSD.
Pan, libre-office and vim are as near to identical as matters to me, and
Mail.app is arguably better than claws-mail, so I'm mostly happy. Flash
works on the Mac but you can turn it off. When I stopped using the
FreeBSD desktop I think that Flash still didn't work, but that seemed
like a good thing. Clearly one's milage can vary on that subject.
These days I run Ubuntu from time to time in a VM, and it is certainly
slick and easy, but it isn't always right (I have grim file system
coherence problems with the vmware directory sharing thing that requires
frequent unmount/remount cycles to resolve.) It's nice that several
commercial tool-chains support Linux as dev platforms now, annoying and
weird that they don't support Mac, given that their tools are all either
command-line or eclipse plugins... FreeBSD's linux compatability would
probably be good enough to swing that one, so maybe I'll switch back...
Cheers,
--
Andrew
Matthew X. Economou
Dec 13, 2011, 1:53:05 PM12/13/11
to
Check out PC-BSD. I've heard good things about it.
I'm running FreeBSD 9.0-RC2 on an old VAIO Picturebook, and it works well enough as a simple desktop. The new installer is much nicer. I took the easy way out by using pre-compiled packages (pkg_add -r xorg gnome2 gnome2-fifth-toe gnome2-power-tools && echo gnome_enable=YES >> /etc/rc.conf). I plan to continue using binary packages to keep it updated. Now I haven't tried anything fancy on it because the hardware is so old, so I can't tell you how well sound or video capture or Flash works.
Best wishes,
Matthew
I'm running FreeBSD 9.0-RC2 on an old VAIO Picturebook, and it works well enough as a simple desktop. The new installer is much nicer. I took the easy way out by using pre-compiled packages (pkg_add -r xorg gnome2 gnome2-fifth-toe gnome2-power-tools && echo gnome_enable=YES >> /etc/rc.conf). I plan to continue using binary packages to keep it updated. Now I haven't tried anything fancy on it because the hardware is so old, so I can't tell you how well sound or video capture or Flash works.
Best wishes,
Matthew
Karel Miklav
Dec 18, 2011, 3:09:06 AM12/18/11
to Aaron Baugher
On 11.12.2011 14:11, Aaron Baugher wrote:
> I'm looking for opinions on using FreeBSD (especially amd64) on a
> desktop workstation, specifically for web programming, meaning that I
> need a browser that works correctly, including Flash (fortunately Flash
> seems on the way out, but it's not there yet). I'd also like to be able
> to do some video editing, and I like compiz (with some 3D effects) as a
> window manager. So in general, how is FreeBSD for a desktop these days?
> I'm fine with the old text installer; I'm only concerned with desktop
> functionality and apps on the running system.
I have a fully functional Gnome based 64-bit FreeBSD desktop with office
> I'm looking for opinions on using FreeBSD (especially amd64) on a
> desktop workstation, specifically for web programming, meaning that I
> need a browser that works correctly, including Flash (fortunately Flash
> seems on the way out, but it's not there yet). I'd also like to be able
> to do some video editing, and I like compiz (with some 3D effects) as a
> window manager. So in general, how is FreeBSD for a desktop these days?
> I'm fine with the old text installer; I'm only concerned with desktop
> functionality and apps on the running system.
applications, flash, TV and media players, financial applications, 3D
games and gaming emulators, development tools, emulators for historic
and foreign platforms etc. It requires some experience, and some care
when buying hardware, so I don't exactly recomend people to try it. If
something doesn't work I run it in an emulator; I do occasional more
complex video editing, audio recording, or reference testing (flash,
HTML) that way. I had compiz but found it tiresome to update and
configure and not of much use. This is a multi-user family computer, on
workstations I do not run desktops.
Regards,
Karel
Bill Laird
Jan 21, 2012, 8:27:47 AM1/21/12
to
On 12/12/2011 00:11, Aaron Baugher wrote:
> I'm looking for opinions on using FreeBSD (especially amd64) on a
<snip>
> I'm looking for opinions on using FreeBSD (especially amd64) on a
>
> So I switched to Ubuntu (Xubuntu, actually), and I was pretty happy with
> it for a while. I missed the ports tree and some favorite utilities
> (why no cpdup on Linux?), but Flash was pretty solid, and I was able to
> get my work done. I've never come to *like* Linux as much as FreeBSD,
> though. It tries a little too hard to abstract things away from me, and
> nothing aggravates me more than not being able to do something like
> configure a network card because a problem with the window manager has
> wiped out the icon for it. I feel like there's more installed and
> running on the system that I'm not aware of, and it's not as good at
> logging things I need to know. I'm just much happier with FreeBSD's way
> of doing things.
>
Better late than never...
> So I switched to Ubuntu (Xubuntu, actually), and I was pretty happy with
> it for a while. I missed the ports tree and some favorite utilities
> (why no cpdup on Linux?), but Flash was pretty solid, and I was able to
> get my work done. I've never come to *like* Linux as much as FreeBSD,
> though. It tries a little too hard to abstract things away from me, and
> nothing aggravates me more than not being able to do something like
> configure a network card because a problem with the window manager has
> wiped out the icon for it. I feel like there's more installed and
> running on the system that I'm not aware of, and it's not as good at
> logging things I need to know. I'm just much happier with FreeBSD's way
> of doing things.
>
FreeBSD 8.2 just installed, XFCE desktop. Works well, fast but
traditionally have not bothered with flash etc.
Xubuntu comments interesting. Here it was Vector 6 to Vector 7 both with
XFCE desktop.
Vector 7 'improvements':
- File manager takes forever to load compared to FreeBSD and Vector 6.
- Browser home page can't be found until, load file manager and access
the folder (on Windows, data drive. Thereby available on all three OS)
Yes likely can fix but decided after your comments on Xubuntu to switch
back to Slackware Linux 13.27, only base system installed at present.
- Like FreeBSD it's a non gui install and can just install what you need.
Anyway may be an option for your needs? Some re-learning for me last was
slack 10 or so...
This OS I use as a TV set and way to check web pages etc.
Cheers
--
Bill
de VK2BLA
Windows 7 on Intel E5200
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