FreeBSD Desktop Setup: Easy Mode(vlog) | IT and DevOps Career Secrets

In this video I talk about how to how a script I wrote to help people get a working freebsd desktop configured, in the hope that it will make it easier for people who are new to freebsd get started as easily as possible, especially if they're coming from a linux environment.

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twitter: @nickbernstein

[Jordan-hzwr]

I think the FreeBSD team has got it figured out with their "principle of least astonishment". At the end of the day it's one of the most stable and boring OS's available. I love it.

[leighhorton]

Nicholas
I just ran your script. I have bsd 13.0 on an older PC. The install with thunderbird and vlc and audacity added with xfce took 51 minutes on our 25 Mbps speed.
It ran through and installed the latest versions of the programs.
The best part I saw for new freebsd folk was the adding the user to the video group. This makes the install perfect. The manual reboot at the end could be a bit clearer. The keyboard or mouse don't trigger shutdown -r now.
Great job. Best of all it works.
Leigh Horton

[mikewatts]

Finding your vids great Nik! Finding a BS free zone and without feeling like someone's trying to sell me a car while I watch is very refreshing ;) Thank you

[henninb]

FreeBSD is solid -- I agree with most of your points. I have recently stood up a desktop with xmonad. It works pretty well. I can do most of the things I want to.

Love it.
I don't know how many times I've looked up a video to get to a desktop.
I would find a different one every time.

This should be included!
'setupwin' or something. -runs a simple fetch/can be updated at server
Simple.

I need to setup for video/stream sfw, and down the rabbit hole I go with codecs and ff stuff.

Love the custom options in freeBSD. Alot of times I edit a .conf in etc, and find out it is in multiple places.

Going to try this out on days off

[Knightjp]

If I have to move away from macOS as my daily driver, FreeBSD would be my OS of choice.

[tobeypeters]

Great script. Very nice & good job going thru it. Should’ve shown how a new user could get FreeBSD & use this script. Not in a VM. 98 -99% of these Linux & FreeBSD easy to use / beginner videos I watch are really for intermediate to advanced users. Out of 5 people in my house, I’m the only one who could do this & who understands what you did or what you said. I’m not coming at you. You never said this was for beginners or anything. I’m sure, this is geared towards someone like me.

[leighhorton]

Hello Nicholas I have setup the xfce desktop and it's all working fine except for samba share. Network shows my network drive but it won't open the folders. It opens the drive, I can see the folders but it won't mount the folders. Any suggestions?

[leighhorton]

Hello Nicholas
Well the script works, in fact it is great. I have tested mate, gnome3, xfce, and the one you showed. Just installed KDE. So far gnome3 could set up samba share as did mate.
Perhaps you can write a script to setup samba share?
It would help heaps.
Leigh

[mgz]

THANK YOU for this!! In the past I tried installing xorg and a DE on some older hardware but no luck to getting to a DE sign-in after initial FreeBSD sign in. I remember also trying out FuryBSD's implementation that has a similar goal but it is no longer available.

I definitely plan to give this a shot soon! Am still very new and have only dabbled with a few Linux distros in the past but really want to learn a BSD. Besides the handbook, were there any other books or resources you would recommend? I've also been watching other channels or videos that cover FreeBSD. Again, really appreciate this.

[oslogrigor]

Damn, I did it the hard way just yesterday. Wish I would've found this. It's not that difficult, but why not automate it.

[Vlad-]

You' ll ~probably don' t endorse my esoteric wm choice, so I' ll just hate your videos from now on.
But seriously, I am not sure people will be turned of by lack of xorg after a fresh install: I think most people will look at freeBSD after knowing its way around Unix. The documentation is totally underrated: I remember a fresh install with no graphics and no wireless and I was able to get into Internet and have a 100% working system with the included manpages, totally offline! ffs, you can do a man <driver name> and you get super clear documentation. Wish I had this on Linux.

Also pleasant to use: Even while using Linux, I do most of my coding and uni assignments under a VM using FreeBSD, just feel comfier there.

[Ati]

Hello, do you have sound problem if using oss, or using oss+pulse, because i have. Its annoying, sometines the sound freezes for like 0.5 sec, the problem presents in mostly firefox, but it also presents in mplayer and other software, i geuss something is wrong with oss, i tried many many configs, without success. Also i had some memory leaks problem with firefox, i opened 6 pages and it ate 10Gigs of ram, in linux it ate only 1 gigs. It happened with some user, they said it is because of ublock origin, but that is not true, because in linux i also used ublock origin. I want to use freebsd as my daily driver, but i have several problems with it, i dont mind if it doesnt support a lot of software, but it have to be stable for me, and i want to control my whole system, as for a desktop, i dont want postfix or other programs to be present in my system. I can do it with for example opensuse, i can select all the softwares that i want, one by one if i want. Anyways i would switch to freebsd, because it felt like, i dont know ... logical, in some cases, it felt more complete, and i also share the Unix philoshophy. Anyways i could not get rid of those problems, also freebsd commuity is not the best if u want to ask. I admit their handbook is good, and i know rtfm first and then ask, but when u read it, and the answere is not there, and the community is also not there, then youu leave, and also the handbook is good in some cases, but its old, and it doesnt not answer all the problems. I used it for a month, i really liked it despites those problems, maybe its the best for servers, but for desktop... ( sorry for my english )

[markzaharov]

Hello. Do you know how to enable thinkpad acpi hotkeys? I've tried to load acpi_ibm but unfortunately it doesn't help on my thinkpad t460. Devd doesn't recognize shortcuts with fn button.