FreeBSD desktop, anybody doing it?

[littleman]

Anybody here using FreeBDS as a desktop? Is it at all practical for you? Are you missing anything that wouldn't be a problem if you used Linux?

[drbrain]

I do, I have a Matrox G550 video card, and the Linux binary HAL driver for XFree86 4.2.0 works great with my native FreeBSD XFree86 4.3. I run MozillaFirebird, blackbox, Gimp, psi (chat), gkrellm, xmms, mplayer and aterm all flawlessly.

USB support for my Cannon Powershot S200 works well, but not perfectly, but I believe this is more the fault of s10sh (which I patched to work on my S200) or the camera itself.

Other people I know run KDE and adore it. My system is too slow (PII-350) and/or I'm too impatient for a desktop manager.

OpenOffice is said to work well, but watch something like freshports to know when its safe to attept a build (or fetch a package).

[dingman]

a couple related, if slightly stale-looking links:

Debian GNU/NetBSD [debian.org]
Debian GNU/FreeBSD [debian.org]

If they can do this, I'd say it's a pretty good bet you can have all your favorite Linux whatever on FreeBSD :)

[drbrain]

... or you could use the Linux ABI and run your native linux binaries (which sometimes even run faster than on an equivalent linux machine).