FreeBSD on Desktop. Who and for what?

Question

FreeBSD

Dear geeks, how many of you have FreeBSD installed on desktop, and for what purpose did you do it?
Thank you.

Answer 1

I use it as a multimedia workstation at home for internet, music, video, java. Xfce4 is installed from the graphical shells. Since the deprecation of HAL/PolicyKit, the problem of mounting media by an unprivileged user has not simply been solved. Otherwise, fresh software can be compiled and updated both from ports (with its own options) and from binary packages. The new FreeBSD 10.1 graphics stack is fairly stable. The performance of an old 4-core Phenom II processor is enough to play 1080p/h.264 encoded video in full Full HD+ screen. I have been using ZFS as a file system since it was ready, no data was lost.

Answer 2

Commander's machine on FreeBSD since 2004. It also stood on laptops - FreeBSD, by the way, teaches you to use proven hardware. At work, too, if there are no corporate standards and the work does not have a Linux target platform, in the latter case, I work on slack.
Why - at first, I wanted to work under Unix, then - I didn’t jump over to Linux, because FreeBSD has a rather conservative development policy and much attention is paid to the integrity of the system, so, from version to version, the structure is more enriched than the form becomes more complicated (i.e. new features emerge from old solutions, rather than a generation of new solutions that solve new problems but don't solve problems that were solved by the old "The best way to destroy FreeBSD is to let our infrastructure rot" (c) Paul-Henning Kamp), and because there is no zoo of configuration models - the distribution, in fact, for everyone, is one - BSD.
For what - multimedia, Internet, development. Flash and Android SDK are screwed through linuxulator, the rest is native, from ports. So far, only two problems make it necessary to have additional "task-oriented" systems (Linux / Windows) - toys and music (MIDI in FreeBSD, somewhere from the 5th branch and still does not work on native drivers, you need Install OSS from the ports, and there - entertainment begins with a mixer, etc. etc.).

Answer 3

I tried once. Took it down quickly. Still, Linux is better for desktop.

Answer 4

I sat for half a year, purely for fun, tired - demolished. If sex in life is not enough - it's the most.

Answer 5

I work all the time. I use Flash for pandora.fm. Since I use vagrant, after setting up the bundle for the UI (openbox+tint+conky+...) and transferring the vim config, everything is fine.

Answer 6

PCBSD and you don't need to invent anything, a ready-made desktop, for what? For everything.