Thank you (for making the ports less boring).

[Matthias Andree]

Am 13.09.2011 21:27, schrieb Michal Varga:

> Though if I had to pick a random case again, it probably wouldn't be too
> hard to make some wildly unsubstantiated guesses:
> 
>  ## From: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de>
>  ## Mailer: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.21) 

"Wildly unsubstantiated" pretty much nails it.

The thing you can see from a second look into ports/ is that FreeBSD's
ports Thunderbird is up to date, unlike my Thunderbird 3.1 on Linux.

Now what?  Nothing proven. :)

> Still I thank everyone for polite replies which were actually a welcome
> change for this kind of threads, but as there is obviously something
> fundamentally different between how I and rest of you guys perceive an
> actually working FreeBSD (or any other, for the matter) workstation, I'm
> going to let it go, this is not the kind fight one would be able to win
> in any case.

And our working desktops don't help you in the least in getting one too.

I have gotten myself into situations where I mutilated my installation,
to the point where X or some Desktop wouldn't start, and random
applications crashed -- and the cause was usually taking short cuts or
not noticing ports/UPDATING; more importantly, there are tools that can
help avoid and/or fix that situation.

For one, I'd start with ports-mgmt/portmaster to run portmaster
--check-depends, and after that install */bsdadminscripts and run
pkg_libchk and see what it comes up with in packages that want to be
rebuilt in order to pull in up-to-date libraries.

> For the next years, I'll be much better off with finishing my migration
> to another system where the base OS will hardly ever be as good and
> clean as FreeBSD, but the overall quality of 24/7 ready, stable, modern
> desktop OS as a whole is by far too wide margin different from what I
> gather is currently considered 'acceptable' here, in FreeBSD (ports)
> circles. No offense meant, in any case.

I think you mentioned Arch Linux, further suggestions would be Gentoo
Linux (you might like emerge), and further options are Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD and using a FreeBSD base system with pkgsrc (rather than
ports) on top.

Good luck in finding the system that really has fewer, rather than only
different, quirks. :)