[talk] Ask Slashdot: Workaday Software For BSD On the Desktop?

[John C. Vernaleo]

>
> 	Lack of hardware support is a perennial issue in *BSDland. However, most of the hardware I’d want to use is supported, even if I can’t get my laptop to wake up from sleep properly; not that I do, because why would I run BSD on my laptop unless I was working on making it run on my laptop?
>
> 	We live in a bifurcated environment. If you want to run Netflix on FreeBSD you’re doing it wrong. Go get a mac or windows pc and watch Netflix. The idea that FreeBSD/Linux/HURD/Plan9 has to run on end-user machines is, in my view, insane. Linux on the desktop hasn’t worked as a concept for almost twenty years now and it’s well past time to get over that. You want Unix on a laptop? Enjoy OS X. Works better than anything else. You want to hack a “proper” Unix on your laptop? Use ssh, or install VirtualBox or something and do it that way while you get to use web browsers that actually work, trackpads that support gestures, and consistently available copy-and-paste.

What about people who run Linux or *BSD on their laptops because they 
don't want to pay a ton for Apple hardware and find the Windows interface 
basically useless?  I've been using Linux on my desktop for years and 
these days BSD (bitrig) on my laptop.  I realize that most people won't 
end up doing either of those things, but I just don't see that as meaning 
we should give up on it for the people who want it.  I prefer having 
similar OSes for my desktop, laptops, and servers.

As for copy and paste, that's been working pretty consistantly for me with 
FVWM since dinosaurs were around (okay, fine, emacs is different, but 
isn't it always?).

And to echo what others have said, even recent thinkpads seem to work 
really well with OpenBSD and Bitrig.

John