Ars Technica article on FreeBSD new user experience

[Chris]

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 15:26:01 +0200 Daniel Ebdrup Jensen debdrup at freebsd.org said

> On 4/12/20, Joe Berner <stackyjoe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > My 2 cents:
> >
> > 1) Make video driver detection a bit more straightforward. Or at least make
> > it dead simple to figure out which you need to install to get things
> > working. I still need 2 or 3 tries with pkg install -f after major driver
> > upgrades to get X server working correctly again with all the peripherals.
> >
> > 2) A wifi tool that's easier to use. wpa_supplicant is fine for those
> > already very comfortable with command line stuff, but for unix newbies it's
> > very intimidating. wpa_cli is better but still too complicated. An
> > interactive CLI tool that lists the SSIDs, lets you pick one, and then
> > progressively fill out the required info would help a lot. I remember
> > finding comments on the forums saying "just plug it in to ethernet to get
> > set up" and that's very inconvenient if not infeasible for a lot of home
> > set ups.
> >
> > 3) The horrible beeping. A newbie who starts out is likely to open up vi on
> > rc.conf (or whatever) and be greeted by a sequence of earsplitting system
> > beeps as they learn that vi is not vim and some of the things they are used
> > to do not work. Them not working is fine, but the beeping feels like a way
> > for the system to mock your failure, and quickly goes from annoying to
> > enraging. Years later I still remember this!
> >
> > I don't think a Xorg + GUI are necessary on a default install, but make it
> > dead simple for a beginner (say, someone who doesn't know to do pkg search
> > $X | less ) to get it set up.
> >
> > Joe
> [snip]
> 
> I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but video driver detection
> can be solved with devmatch(8) for which there is an open issue [1]
> that needs help, to add support for radeonkms and amdgpu, and
> eventually vboxgfx and vmwgfx for virtualbox and vmware respectively,
> plus nouveau if/when that lands and likely others (for example,
> rockchip/videocore/et cetera drivers for ARM SBCs/systems) in the
> future, as the DRM stack keeps getting bigger and bigger upstream.
> 
> As for wireless configuration tools, there's 'bsdconfig wireless',
> which uses dialog(1) and therefore works on any terminal, as well as
> net-mgmt/wifimgr for GTK, and net/wpa_supplicant_gui/ for Qt.
> (Yes, 'bsdconfig wireless' is missing from the man-page, but hopefully
> not for long [2])
> 
> Your third point seems to be that you might not at that point have
> been aware that they're called bell events (specifically, audible bell
> events), and are turned off with either the hw.syscons.bell or
> kern.vt.enable_bell OIDs in sysctl(8) - so now you know, and knowing
> is half the battle. ;)
> There is a bigger problem underneath this that speaks to habits that
> are in some cases distribution-specific - ie. distributions might use,
> for example, Bill Joys version of vi, nvi v1/v2 (started by Keith
> Bostic, but contributed to by many others over the years), vim,
> Almquist sh, Bourne sh, Debian Almquist sh, some combination thereof
> depending on PATH, or even some that I'm forgetting.

Thanks for such an informative reply, Daniel.

As there were several replies regarding sh(1) [Almquist sh]. I'd
like to add what I think is a good reference to it I found here:
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/ash/

> 
> 
> [1]: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-drm/issues/68
> [2]: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D24378

--Chris