Everybody’s expectations are different. I’ve been using FreeBSD as my desktop for about a month now, and I think it’s great. It somehow feels more consistent and put together than Debian, maybe because the “base system” is all developed and built together.
My setup is almost exactly the same as my Debian setup: Emacs, SBCL, and StumpWM built from source, with NVidia drivers, Firefox, pidgin, rxvt-unicode, tmux, and zsh installed via package manager.
System configuration is a little different, but almost everything is done with the “sysctl” or “sysrc” CLI tools, and they support tab completion in zsh and are documented pretty well.
I have two graphics cards in this machine, so I had to create an xorg.conf telling X which one to use by default. Setting up my USB sound card was also straight forward - I had to use sysrc to load the uaudio kernel module during boot up, and then “sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=9” to make it the default.
One downside is that Spotify and Amazon Video don’t play. For Spotify I’m able to use spotifyd, controlling it through my phone or via spotify-tui. For Amazon Video I boot into Linux, or play it on my MB. YouTube (and most web video, actually) plays fine.
Another problem I’ve run into is that there’s no OpenCL support for NVidia GPUs. It seems there’s some conflicts between the FreeBSD kernel APIs and NVidia’s driver API, and both sides are being stubborn about it.
Everybody’s expectations are different. I’ve been using FreeBSD as my desktop for about a month now, and I think it’s great. It somehow feels more consistent and put together than Debian, maybe because the “base system” is all developed and built together.
My setup is almost exactly the same as my Debian setup: Emacs, SBCL, and StumpWM built from source, with NVidia drivers, Firefox, pidgin, rxvt-unicode, tmux, and zsh installed via package manager.
System configuration is a little different, but almost everything is done with the “sysctl” or “sysrc” CLI tools, and they support tab completion in zsh and are documented pretty well.
I have two graphics cards in this machine, so I had to create an xorg.conf telling X which one to use by default. Setting up my USB sound card was also straight forward - I had to use sysrc to load the uaudio kernel module during boot up, and then “sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=9” to make it the default.
One downside is that Spotify and Amazon Video don’t play. For Spotify I’m able to use spotifyd, controlling it through my phone or via spotify-tui. For Amazon Video I boot into Linux, or play it on my MB. YouTube (and most web video, actually) plays fine.
Another problem I’ve run into is that there’s no OpenCL support for NVidia GPUs. It seems there’s some conflicts between the FreeBSD kernel APIs and NVidia’s driver API, and both sides are being stubborn about it.