Running DragonFly BSD as a desktop environment - questions reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- honeywhite · 2018-05-30 00:34 My use case: I am a young law student who also writes books and is self-employed in the finance industry (I run a private fund concentrating on cannabis and defence stocks - yes, weird combination, but Northrop Grumman and its ilk are straight-up-and-vertical, low- risk, low-return, expensive investments to balance out the uncertainty inherent in the recreational daily-habits market - the latter tend to be cheap on a per-share basis). The applications I use most then are TECO (usually SciTECO but if forced TECOC) -> LaTeX for publishing, SeaMonkey/Firefox for Web browsing and legal research, plus a few finance utilities for buying and selling stocks. Also, Lisp (my programming language of choice). I no longer program on my Unix boxes; I have a LispM (with a somewhat customised Symbolics Genera running on top of an old Ubuntu) for that. I used to run DragonFly BSD on a computer that has since broken; my usual desktop environment has been Mint Linux, and in one case, a Genera that I've re-titled Gennaro and possibly plan to open-source. When I did run BSD, in spite of my love of command-line applications, I needed a desktop environment for file browsing and suchlike - this was several years ago and the only real choice was Xfce. I loved DragonFly because of its HAMMER file system - this is mostly because I frequently clobbered files that I needed, or deleted them by accident, and HAMMER could easily bring them back if I needed. I also liked the package manager. I've seen that Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, Gnome, and KDE are now available for DragonFly. Are these relatively recent versions? Easy to install? I'm thinking of getting one of my computers back up and running and am considering using BSD, but not if Xfce remains the only option (and I don't consider Fluxbox or Lumina a "proper" desktop environment). Not having a decent desktop environment is a DEAL BREAKER for me. The other options of course are Linux (Cinnamon or perhaps Ubuntu Budgie) and Genera/Gennaro. I'm still learning the Lisp Machine bit by bit, hoping to have it running on a VERY minimalised Linux distro eventually, so maybe not the best thing to use for a production class system but it IS way cool. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- deux3xmachina · 2018-05-30 01:54 I'm not so sure about the "decent desktop environment" because I'm the kind of person that spends all my time in a terminal emulator until I need to log into Windows to fix something. I honestly have a hard time using DE's with how sluggish they feel even on great hardware, they just don't "click" for me. However, it's still quite easy to install, and if you're willing to report issues and work with the extremely friendly and helpful devs, admins, and maintainers in the DragonFly BSD channel on efnet, it absolutely rivals Linux in terms of performance and usability. Depending on the DE you're interested in, you can even install and test them from the installation media, totally risk free. Worst case scenario, you're out a few hours one day testing it out with the aforementioned awesome people, and install some other system you're more comfortable using. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapo_Rouge · 2018-05-30 05:42 Cinnamon on DF is at 2.4 while at 3.6 on Linux Mint so I would not call it recent by any means sadly. KDE4 is present, also ancient since we've KDE5, there's bits and pieces of KDE5 is Dports it seems but dunno if you can get the whole deal. MATE is at version 1.20 which is current, pretty neat GNOME is at 3.18 which is like 5 versions behind Xfce stays at good old 4.12 I ran DragonFlyBSD briefly as a desktop \(around 4.6/4.8\) before switching to FreeBSD for application reasons and my 2cents on this is that Xfce is the more portable/polished desktop around, with some theming it can look as you want and is really fast. PS: Care to share a screenie of Genera/Gennaro ? :\) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lbmn · 2018-05-30 06:44 You can easily see DragonFlyBSD ports version numbers via: * [avalon.dragonflybsd.org/dports/dragonfly:5.4:x86:64/LATEST/All/](ht tps://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/dports/dragonfly:5.4:x86:64/LATEST/All/) * [github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DPorts/tree/master/x11](https://github.com/ DragonFlyBSD/DPorts/tree/master/x11) * [github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DPorts/tree/master/x11\- wm](https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DPorts/tree/master/x11-wm) IMHO i3 ought to be "decent" enough for any pro. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- malenkydroog · 2018-05-30 09:07 I've only used Xfce, XMonad, and bspwm \(after using tiling window managers, I really can't go back\), plus midnight commander for file browsing needs... but fwiw, it sounds like devs are working on getting KDE5 stuff in \(see [here](http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/use rs/2018-May/335755.html)\), so hopefully that will be an option for you before too long. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MaxPayneNoir · 2018-05-30 10:01 DragonflyBSD is undoubtedly less smooth than FreeBSD on desktop, that's a matter of fact, but I used it for 2 years, before the low specs of my laptops would make me want switch to NetBSD; overall great experience, and HAMMER is fantastic, so go on; teco is found in dports ;\). If I were you, I'd use Lumina as DE, otherwise somethinng like fluxbox or fvwm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- horning · 2018-05-30 11:25 Mate has been working reasonably well for me on DragonFly, but then I mostly use terminal emulators, a web browser, a mail client and the LibreOffice spreadsheet. Coming from Linux Mint, I haven't been lost so far. The only annoying thing I noticed is Mate is unable to power down the screen after some inactivity period, it apparently tries to use some proprietary Linux method for that. Oh well, xset +dpms is a reasonable workaround. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- floatboth · 2018-05-30 13:20 > bits and pieces of KDE5 is Dports it seems but dunno if you can get the whole deal Full Plasma 5 landed in FreeBSD ports recently. As Dports is a downstream of FreeBSD ports, they should get it too, unless something breaks on DFly specifically. Also, GNOME is 3.28 in the [gnome ports' 3.26 branch](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports- gnome/tree/gnome-3.26), might be able to merge that into Dports maybe? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- honeywhite · 2018-05-30 19:10 What's i3? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- honeywhite · 2018-05-30 19:59 Out of the lightweight but full-fledged desktop environments, the "least worst" would, in my considered opinion, be Xfce. For a pure window manager, I'd have to go with fluxbox. FVWM is one step past vomit-inducingly ugly; it looks as if the Tardis picked it up sometime in 1995, flew twenty years, and dropped it off here and now. Not too, too familiar with Lumina, but it does seem from a very cursory look not to be as nice as Xfce, and note my phrasing above: Xfce is by no means worthy of an art gallery. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Viceroy_Fizzlebottom · 2018-05-30 22:35 Like many window managers FVWM is as pretty as you make [it](https://i.imgur.com/AyWuFaR.png) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- honeywhite · 2018-05-30 22:42 I underestimated its customisability, I guess - out of the metaphorical box though it looks like vintage CDE. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- strngsvlmstng96 · 2018-05-31 04:47 i3 is a tiling window manager