Ars Technica article on FreeBSD new user experience

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> 
> > On Apr 10, 2020, at 5:46 PM, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Kyle Evans wrote this message on Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 09:49 -0500:
> 
> ?
> 
> >> My memory here is incredibly hazy, it may be that I was scarred by
> >> history not persisting at all across sessions or something like this;
> >> I quickly installed zsh and never looked back.
> > 
> > Yeah, history isn't kept by default, not sure if there's an option to
> > keep it, if there is, I don't see it in the man page, and ctrl-r doesn't
> > work either.
> 
> 	There is history support, but it?s not on by default and it?s not spelled the same way as other shells (I don?t think it?s persistent between shell invocations, however):
> 
>              The following variables affect the execution of fc:
> 
>              FCEDIT        Name of the editor to use for history editing.
> 
>              HISTSIZE      The number of previous commands that are
>                            accessible.
> 
> 
> 	Given that the only other base system shell option is csh, I opt out of both and always install bash (I haven?t quite jumped on the zsh train yet).
> Thanks,

There are many blogs around for the Linuxes about what to do right
after you finish an install, like the apt get update, apt get upgrade.. blah blah blah.

Perhaps a few of those for FreeBSD would go a long way to dull a few of our poken sticken?

After you have installed a FreeBSD basic system you may wish to:

	1)  Install an alternate shell.  FreeBSD ships with 2 very minimal
	    shells, /bin/sh and /bin/csh (actaull a tcsh).  Many users like
	    bash, zsh, or ksh any of which can be installed with:
	    pkg install <shellname>

	2)  If you need a desktop experience you'll need to add X11:
	    ....

I feel this would go a long long ways in moving the peg forward.


> -Enji
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org