[nycbug-talk] BSD on a desktop

[pete wright]

On Jul 30, 2004, at 9:05 PM, G.Rosamond wrote:

> I'm working on a outline of making FreeBSD a useful desktop.  It's 
> aimed at those who have told me face-to-face so many times that they'd 
> love to try out a BSD, but have so many basic functions that aren't 
> fulfilled by BSD on a desktop.
>
> It may become a meaty piece of documentation for our documentation 
> project, or maybe a serialized piece in Daemon News, or who knows 
> what. . .
>
> I'd appreciate any input anyone has in terms of their favorite X 
> packages to run. . .and using which window manager.  I'm not going to 
> cover Gnome or KDE environments, but rather focus on XFCE, FVWM, 
> MLVWM, WindowMaker, etc. . .
>
> I'd love to hear some input, particularly for those running a BSD 
> desktop. . .this includes Dan's love for xplanet, etc. . .useful for 
> end-user tasks and/or just fun.
>
...pete strap's on his asbestos fireman suit....
	OK I'm a GNOME user, and I'm not sure why you would not want to 
include it in your examination of WM's.  It's not like the GNOME team 
doesn't have a lot of the Xorg people working with them ;^)  seriously 
tho, I feel that Gnome 2.6 runs pretty great on most modern hardware 
and it's easy-pees'y-puddin-pie to install via ports (including the 5th 
toe port).  Most of the X11 ports you are going to run into these day's 
either require QT or GTK2, so you are most likely going to be 
installing most of the KDE and GNOME libraries anyway....

	So let's assume they are used to CDE for some reason  and want a 
modern WM that is similar to CDE, I would go with XFCE.  It's also 
GTK2+ so if an app works on GNOME you are all set.  I guess there is 
also fvwm2 as well, which is my personal lightweight favorite.  here is 
my list of apps that I *need* on any desktop workstation I setup:

moz, thunderbird, firefox, Xchat, konqueror,  konsole (love tabbed 
shells), gnome-multiterm (again love tabbed shells), xterm, xmms, 
realplayer, abiword, gnumeric.

That's about it, must of the "real" utilities i use are in a shell 
anyway.  I've tried using OOo, but really think it's over kill for my 
admin duties.  Abiword has no problems with .doc formats and gnumeric I 
think is better than Excell, and I read somewhere that it's infact more 
precise than excell....

For me it's really the tabbed shells that won me over with using GNOME 
or KDE.  You can use tab's in gnome-term, but it's kinda crappy 
compared to konsole.  if you have not tried it out, the default 
shortcut is ctl+shift+t to make a new tab, and shift+left/right arrow 
key moves from tab to tab.


-p

> Thanks. . .
>
> g
>
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