Reply to post: Re: ...Meanwhile, the Linux world has a profusion of rival distros, desktops, and packaging formats

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ...Meanwhile, the Linux world has a profusion of rival distros, desktops, and packaging formats

[Author here]

> there aren't many BSD desktops

I don't know about that. It has its own, Lumina, and on top of that it can run most of the Linux ones. GNOME, KDE, Xfce, MATE, even more obscure ones such as Window Maker + GNUstep, they're all there.

But if you mean desktop BSD distros, yes, I agree. It's left up to the user to configure their own, and that IMHO is a big failing.

Even within just FreeBSD there are two totally different ways to do this:

* manually install all the packages you need: X11, Intel DRM drivers, then a desktop environment, then the apps;

* using `desktop-installer`, which asks a lot of questions and leads to an install with some parts built from source or fetched from Git or whatever, and which you must update in a totally different way which almost no online info about FreeBSD mentions (`auto-admin`).

The former has little help and involves a lot of trial and error but gives a clean stable system that needs few updates. The latter asks a tonne of questions but automates away a lot of work, does deliver more current components, but it needs as frequent updating as any Linux.

FreeBSD people are either unaware of this, or consider it totally normal and not worth mentioning. This is true of a lot of the BSD experience, and the perceived benefits are often not apparent at all to those coming from Linux or other Unixes.

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