Putting my new FreeBSD 9.3 desktop online ....

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2014 13:03:07 -0600 (MDT), Warren Block wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Aug 2014, Polytropon wrote:
> 
> > Why did I abandon Xfce? Because it's not "portable enough"
> > anymore. It's a "mostly Linux" desktop environment where the
> > attempt of running it on FreeBSD leads to despair - it's not
> > trivial to set up anymore, and functionality is lacking.
> 
> I don't understand this.  xfce works quite well for me. 

I've been using Xfce on Linux and in my (very individual
and non-comparable) experience it works much better there.



> There is no 
> automounter, and a few years back, I wrote one.  But doing that well is 
> non-trivial, so I just manually mount things now.

I started with the HAL/DBnus/whahtever automount approach
that is suggested in many howtos (and among the justifications
on why HAL is needed), but it didn't work. Then I switched
to Gnome and it also didn't work. After that, I did install
some automounter from the ports, that somehow started
working, but didn't unmount (and eject) media, so I "rewrote"
umount - with a script. Now it works. But don't ask me how
and why. :-)

The old XFCE 3 desktop had "mount wrappers" - xfmount and
xfumount, which mounted media when accessed, opened a file
browser, and after closing that window, unmounted the media.
It didn't do that automatically of course.

Real automount functionality had been working both in KDE
and Gnome in ye olden days (when XFCE wasn't mature yet).
Personally, I don't need and explicitely don't _want_ any
automounting. Obviously I'm not running a "traditional"
desktop. ;-)



> Otherwise, I can't 
> think of much that xfce does not do.

There is some customization that didn't work as expected,
selection of default applications, and other things I forgot.
With Gnome 2, it's much better now. Especially the inter-
nationalization features (!) for the german language seem
to be better there. This is a _must_ for some of my users,
so whenever something doesn't work and a "stupid" english
text comes up, they go crazy.

Now that I got it working I don't question it anymore.



> It does not have preferences 
> settings for positioning multiple monitors, which I think is nothing to 
> do with FreeBSD.

That is what I use xorg.conf for anyway. :-)



> LXDE might be fine, it's been a while since I tried it.  Back then, it 
> did not seem to have an integrated way of handling desktop icons.

Now it seems to have, but there are other things that drove
me away of it. Again, I can't tell which those where. I've
been using LXDE on different Linux distributions and hoped
it would work the same on FreeBSD. No... :-(



> For 
> me, that's not a big deal, but I tend to look at minimal desktops as 
> something to give to ex-Windows users.

Exactly that was my intention. But their complexity and
complicatedness (!) has grown in the same way that makes
"Windows" unusable and ununderstandable for non-technical
persons. I know there are excellent customization guides
that make Xfce look and feel like Mac OS X - which I like,
and several of my users too, so I installed wbar, had a
long customization session with Gnome, and now they are
happy about their "iMac". :-)

But creating a nice and usable desktop is possible with
other means, too. The older versions of VirtualBSD as
well as FreeSBIE show how to do it. But I've given up
already. The only solution would be to create my own
"conglomerate" of tools and settings, but I don't have
enough "target group pressure" so I'll leave that for
a future time. ;-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...