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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I would probably daily drive FreeBSD or OpenBSD if the desktop situation was better. I don't know how people survive open-source desktop environments.

I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to build a reasonable HiDPI desktop environment on a variety of open source platforms and nothing has the level of fit and finish I am looking for. So far I have been happiest with Elementary OS and their treatments to Gnome... but it preturbs me that getting a new rig setup is so fickle and unrepeatable. You can spend hours tweaking shit and experimenting with no reasonable way to save your changes to be applied later to a clean install or even a different platform. I wish I could check my entire configuration into git.

Would love if the hackers here would share their FreeBSD (or any Nix) desktop environment configuration (including window manager etc...)

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I use FreeBSD when developing non-mobile work (which is mostly java backends + JavaScript react).

My environment is

- Hyper-V on windows laptop

- FreeBSD 12.1 as guest (zfs)

- FreeBSD packages I use for devel (installed simply with its standard 'pkg add') are: InteliJC, vscode, openjdk11, postgres12-server, node12, tmux

- Desktop env is: xrdp (to allow remote desktop into the VM), wmaker (window manager and wmakerconf to config it), qterminal or lilyterm

So I just use Remote Desktop from windows host, into FreeBSD VM using XRDP and just run like that.

I connect using 24 or 32 bit depth (via RDP protocol) and tend to run Darkish/pastel colors themes in Visual Code and IntelliJ.

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I know this is not an ideal setup, but lack of support for mobile dev (android at least) prevents me from using FreeBSD directly on hardware...

When Running on native hardware, without VM, I tend to use Pop! Linux because of how beautiful it looks, on HiDPI or regular screens, and it is relatively easy for me to use, as somehow that window manager setup does not get in my way

I also usually install emacs 27 or 28, but those require a binary package download from

https://freebsd.pkgs.org/12/freebsd-ports-latest-i386/ghub-e...

Use Emacs rarely these days, because of its lackluster support for JavaScript+Flow tooling.

I would much rather use Emacs for everything.. but right now I just use it to write status reports (org mode)…

Sorry, forgot to add the ever useful vermaden FreeBSD Desktop Series blog, to answer the previous question

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/

The trick is to not use a desktop environment. Stick to a simple WM and do your stuff in the terminal like back in the 90s and you're good. The DE stuff is basically more or less well-written GUI wrappers for command line tools anyway and the most common operations you do can be handled with simple bash aliases or, worst case, small shell scripts.

Some DE:s are ostensibly nice and polished, but my feeling is that they mainly provide a soft landing for Windows and Mac dropouts. There's always a few spots where the thin veneer starts peeling and, given you know how to operate it, you'll soon find yourself back in the terminal anyway.

I had great looking results with sway + alacritty + swaybar + firefox-wayland on Nixos 20.03-pre.

> Nixos 20.03-pre

Any special reason you're on unstable?

Oh, try running a Linux or BSD hypervisor and putting your desktop OS on that. Once you're decoupled from the hardware, you can start thinking about how you're going to backup or deploy your desktop configs (eg - Ansible) for your perfect WM or DE.

It's a lot easier than it sounds once you do it, but you do have to take some time surmounting the initial barrier to entry, which is mostly reading.

Remember, if you can click on it, it's probably just a wrapper around a documented utility that does the actual work. And if you can do basic webdev like HTML and CSS, you can customize your desktop through its configs.

KDE has the best HiDPI support I've seen, but I don't really care for KDE itself and as soon as I step outside the QT ecosystem all bets are off.

FreeBSD 12, Nvidia, KDE5. Everything works perfectly, including hidpi (unlike Gnome, there is a single desktop-wide DPI setting, which just happens to work).

I have used a primer from here: https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/

one of the reasons i gave up on DEs and now run only a tiling WM setup on a releaseless distro were the weirdly subtle changes and/or bugs associated with new releases, often changing GNOME in some form or fashion. KDE may fare better here, i am not sure.

in effect i have what i think you want, which is a way to bootstrap a new desktop/laptop based on a script (read: from a flash drive with minimal setup). however it is not as clean as what i see Nix offers. but, i don't have to worry about some "release" completely goofying up my setup. so it is nicely stable and deterministic to that extent.

I've got a arch i3 config I like. I've tuned a little over the years, but it's remained mostly the same. I keep the dotfiles in the same repo I keep useful shell scripts I've built, other program config files, etc. Many people, me included, gravitate towards the more "minimalist" linux configs for that reason. If I get time to make sure I haven't accidentally left a password in an old script, I'll make a public repo and link it.

With gnome, you can export the gconf database and check it into git if that's your thing.

This doesn't help you, but I just use a conventional DPI monitor and Xfce on FreeBSD works well without any special configuration.

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