[Discuss] Three FreeBSD Topics

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2014-12-11 21:23-0800 Cy Schubert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm toying with the idea of presenting three separate FreeBSD-related
> topics at a few of our meetings.
>
> First, PC-BSD, a distribution based on FreeBSD 10.1 with an out-of-the-box
> configured KDE or LXDE GUI.
>
> FreeNAS, a FreeBSD 9.2 NAS distribution, configured through a web interface.
>
> pfsense, a FreeBSD 9 based firewall configured through a web interface.
>
> We could also add FreeBSD itself to the list, which can be configured with
> over 26,000 packages, including gnome, kde, lxde, and others.

Hi Cy:

Your mention of KDE on FreeBSD captured my interest.

We have had a number of discussions on this list about the reliability
of KDE on various Linux distros.  My KDE experience is quite extensive
(I have been using it for more than a decade now) but also pretty
shallow; I am a fast touch typist and bash is really convenient to use
on the command line so I tend to use the bash command line on an xterm
rather than the KDE desktop GUI's that are available to do the same
command-line tasks.  From that experience I find KDE is completely
reliable on Debian stable (there might be a crash of a KDE application
such as the konqueror browser every 6 months or so).  Also, I
typically measure overall KDE uptimes in months (it has been 59 days
since I rebooted [because a kernel upgrade required that], and 6
months uptime is not that unusual for me).

IIRC from John's experience KDE was not as reliable as he would have
liked for Debian stable (likely because he uses the KDE desktop GUI's
much more than I do, and that experience was from the early days of
KDE4), but he was completely satisfied with KDE reliability on
OpenSuse which is consistent with the excellent reputation that Linux
distro's specially tweaked and tuned KDE desktop has always had.

Do you have any extensive experience with KDE and say one other
desktop on FreeBSD?  If so, that might be the basis of a topic for
discussion concerning desktop reliability that would be personally
interesting to me.  I would be somewhat less interested in the usual
desktop discussion of the gee-whiz killer features of particular
desktop software since I doubt I will ever move away from KDE.

Fundamentally, I want my desktop to be easy to configure in a few
minutes, then I want it to get out of my way and be absolutely and
totally reliable as I proceed with my command-line work (which is
mostly concerned with developing software in my retirement years). KDE
on Debian stable fills that bill for me, and I wonder if it is
similarly reliable for FreeBSD users (although I doubt I would ever
take the time to evaluate FreeBSD since the Debian distro of GNU/Linux
satisfies my needs).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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