{"id":228,"date":"2012-03-18T20:10:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-19T01:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/?p=228"},"modified":"2013-03-13T12:08:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T17:08:40","slug":"freebsd-on-the-desktop-how-much-are-we-giving-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/2012\/03\/18\/freebsd-on-the-desktop-how-much-are-we-giving-up\/","title":{"rendered":"FreeBSD on the Desktop: How much are we giving up?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been running FreeBSD for awhile now. Looking back at my posts, it appears that I hammed up my Slackware installation right around the turn of the new year so near abouts three-and-a-half months.<\/p>\n

FreeBSD on the desktop, if you’ve experienced it, is a learning experience. So much that at times I feel like I’m being punished for not knowing everything about my system.<\/p>\n

To clarify on my desktop history you should know that a few months ago I switched to xmonad for my window management from Fluxbox. I went from an already minimal window-manager to an an even more minimal window-manager.<\/p>\n

I don’t want my desktop to do everything for me all the time. On the other side of the coin, I don’t want to have to do everything for it.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this disconnect when I fired up Fedora 16 on a machine at home (it was running FreeBSD but I was sick of compiling packages from ports. Yes, I know I can get packages in binary but I can’t understand how to keep my binary packages and ports in sync for cherry picking every other source.) Everything just worked together.<\/p>\n

After installing emacs and copying my global .emacs.d\/ things are just working. After a `yum install xmonad` I am able to login under xmonad. I see they’ve even included a .xmonad\/ in my home.<\/p>\n

The Fedora developers must have a picture in mind of how the system should be and it appears that all packages have been designed with this picture in mind.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what this means for FreeBSD. The\u00a0craftsmanship\u00a0of the FreeBSD project never ceases to amaze me. I love<\/em> just setting my variables in rc.conf. However, it seems to me that more work needs to be done to integrate binary and source versions.<\/p>\n

Some ports build against the kernel source. Why is my \/usr\/src not updated by freebsd-update? (Update: yes, it can update \/usr\/src.)<\/p>\n

If FreeBSD could solve the Package vs Ports dilemma, and if packagers provided more apparent defaults for settings then FreeBSD would be a very strong desktop. I’m sorry that everything I plug in isn’t automagically configured, but doing that is\u00a0complex\u00a0<\/em>and what is\u00a0convenient\u00a0for me may be\u00a0inconvenient\u00a0for the masses.<\/p>\n

In the coming days, I do see myself spending some time contemplating the differences in experiences. FreeBSD truly is the unknown giant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been running FreeBSD for awhile now. Looking back at my posts, it appears that I hammed up my Slackware installation right around the turn of the new year so near abouts three-and-a-half months. FreeBSD on the desktop, if you’ve experienced it, is a learning experience. So much that at times I feel like I’m … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “FreeBSD on the Desktop: How much are we giving up?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13,188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thoughts","category-unix-linux","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/files\/2012\/03\/daemon_hammer.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p16T7G-3G","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/meyersh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}