ah, the memories
this + dwn https://dwm.suckless.org/
then I said to myself "why am I wasting so much time tinkering with stuff that gains me nothing" and moved on in my life
I think it also helps that I've never really tinkered with it. I took someone's build that had a few things I wanted, and I think that's it. In contrast, I spend more time on a regular desktop environment setting up shortcuts.
For simple console stuff on the terminal, it's ok. But when the GUI is involved, or anything with a lot of computation, having to translate all of the instructions from native ARM64 back to x86/64 and back takes a ton of resources and time.
You can do that in Linux...
> Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else.
Not really? I think the BSDs are simpler, change less and are better documented.
Source: I ran OpenBSD on desktops in early 2000s.
> Source: I ran OpenBSD on desktops in early 2000s.
From my experience witb BSDs on a SUN pizza box (also around 2000) : FreeBSD had the docs on the internet, not very helpful when you want to configure the network. OpenBSD was ok. Linux (my first choice) was slow as hell.
RTFM will go a very, very long way on this OS.
I think I _may_ have done that before. What I thought was interesting is FreeBSD just did that without any extra steps. When I "apt-get install" a desktop environment in Ubuntu or Debian and reboot, the desktop environment loads by default. In FreeBSD, I guess there's some startup scripts I would need to edit to start X and the desktop manager...
Well, it depends on what you install. If you install just xorg and a window manager, it usually won't boot into it.
If you install GNOME or KDE that ship with a display manager, it will be configured to boot into it. That is what you would usually want though.
On the surface, FreeBSD sounds cool. I liked that I could boot directly to a console and then run the GUI only if I wanted to. Everything felt more modular. It reminded me of the days before Windows 95 when I could just use DOS to save precious memory and CPU bandwidth.
Only I'm not sure I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. I felt like I'd be spending my time administering the machine and nothing else. Maybe it was just because it was running in a VM. Maybe it was because it's ARM. Not sure. I'd love to hear others experiences with FreeBSD on ARM.