4 Jun
2015
4 Jun
'15
7:37 a.m.
Hi all!
As it is indeed quite quiet on the mailinglist I thought I might share my 4 months of
FreeBSD Desktop here :-)
What I especially like on *BSD is that there are no surprises. Things simply work as
doctumented. There is valid documentation and a handbook that covers almost all things
you'd want to know. But if an application is not in ports, things get ugly. And
that's the down side of FreeBSD: no TDE.
In quest for a usable desktop environment I went over GNOME (argh! Now I know again why I
hate it) over XFCE (too gnomish) to LXDE (too windows like) and KDE4 (yes, that was a
rainy day full of desperation. Just like visiting a home-improvement market: you almost
get what you need, but in the end of the day you've spent a lot of time and mony and
didn't get the job done).
Days got better after purging these nice DEs: openbox was an improvement but in the end
FVWM came and stayed. Now my FVWM looks quite simillar to my TDE setup on wheezy :-)
But there are some things that I cannot quite replace:
kmail: the one and only mailclient that has a working maildir implementation and usable
GUI. This is the one and only application I did not find a usable replacement for.
kpdf: slim, working PDF viewer. I've also tried mupdf (very good and fast, but I
cannot mark and copy text), epdfviewer (ok, but quite broken copy function, hangs on pdfs
with big images), okular (slow like a slug, pulls in 1GB dependecies, full of clutter,
otherwise ok) and evince (well, GNOME), non is a match. I use mupdf+epdfviewer for now.
konqueror: pcmanfm is a usable replacement, but needs quite a bit of work till it does
it's job.
So, it's 30°C outside, rainy days all gone, and I'm here on FreeBSD with FVWM and
kmail running in a VM ... and desperatly waiting for Slavec to sort out the -fPIC compiler
issue on FreeBSD :-)
Nik
--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.