Hi, a dual booting and printing question

[Manish Jain]

On 10/09/16 19:33, Olaoluwa Omokanwaiye wrote:
 > I am wondering what the best desktop is that I can use on my FreeBSD
 > 10.3 that will not freeze and that will allow me to switch between
 > terminals.

I wish it were known which is the best desktop for you  : -)
But I will give you a few choices to try.

For a long time, I used gnome3 which is pretty good

(once you disable HotSpot via a web-based plugin available at

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner

and then use the native Tweak Tool to turn on the Applications Menu and 
the Window List).

But I myself now prefer KDE4. KDE needs a little bit of time 
configuring, but is super-slick and super-functional.

I would suggest at least 4 GB RAM for Gnome/KDE. Both Gnome and KDE 
support multiple virtual desktops. While it's not necessary to have 
multiple virtual desktops to launch multiple gnome-terminal or konsole 
windows, it helps.

If you want a lightweight DE, try Lumina. This is FreeBSD's own 
nuts-and-bolts DE - mostly finished, but still works in the making. You 
might like it, at least as an alternate DE. Lumina uses the term 
workspace for virtual desktop, of which it supports 2 by default. If you 
use Lumina, disable all login managers, put this in ~/.xinitrc :

exec /usr/local/bin/start-lumina-desktop

Then whenever you want to start Lumina, use the command startx.

It's interesting that your question mentions dual-booting and printing 
problem in the subject, but there is none of that in the message body. 
Since I use dual-booting myself as well as a printer, I might be able to 
help with those.

It looks to me that you are essentially setting up your computer. My 
advice that you should remember is that while FreeBSD is immensely 
flexible, give it good hardware - a good mainboard + CPU, a Bronze/Gold 
rated power supply, at least 4 GB RAM, a fastish hard disk (if you can 
afford something like USD 100 for this; try a solid state disk).