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But what if your friends and relatives are more interested in FreeBSD than Linux? Well, here we have a detailed guide to setting up a FreeBSD desktop using KDE Plasma and Wayland. Yes, Wayland is available in the BSD world as well, and in a few years I wouldn’t be surprised to see most FreeBSD desktop guides – including the documentation from FreeBSD itself – to primarily advise using Wayland over X11, as Wayland support in FreeBSD improve even further.
I’m sure this will upset nobody.
Wayland is inevitable on FreeBSD for the same reason as on Linux–applications.
There are of course now several Wayland only desktop environments–including Niri which I am in now). A bigger problem is that there are going to be more and more Wayland only applications.
There are only a handful of Wayland only applications at the moment. As GUI toolkits like GTK go Wayland only, the Wayland-only app universe will grow rapidly. There are Wayland-only GUI toolkits now. Eventually, there will be popular apps created with them.
The other big force will be hardware. But I personally think it will be longer before hardware stops working on Xorg. Time will tell.
This takes me back – way back – to the early days on Linux on the desktop. My first Linux install (alongside NT4) had kernel 2.0.36 – so we are looking back to 1999 or 2000.. Back then, we needed all sorts of guides, fudges and cludges to get a graphical desktop up and running on Linux. I was a Unix professional, and it was hard enough!
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is my main workstation now, and all you do is download it, install it, and populate it with the latest software you need. No guides or help are required. I think that Fedora and Mint are just the same. Download, accept all defaults, install, and you are away.ugh!
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is my main workstation now, and all you do is download it, install it, and populate it with the latest software you need. No guides or help are required. I think that Fedora and Mint are jus
Being an old Unix pro, FreeBSD is certainly appealing, and I have installed it several times over many years. However, it brings back memories (bad memories) of the turn-of-the-century Linux experience. Actually, it is worse! I think my original RedHat install in 1999 gave me a graphical X session, which is more than FreeBSD does today.
I have no idea as to why anyone would want to run FreeBSD rather than Linux, other that for the feel of being different.
A
PS: I did use FreeBSD on a Thinkpad in the early 2000s. It was faster than Linux. That was when APM was used. When ACPI took over, FreeBSD lost out, and it has been Linux ever since for me.
This takes me back – way back – to the early days on Linux on the desktop. My first Linux install (alongside NT4) had kernel 2.0.36 – so we are looking back to 1999 or 2000.. Back then, we needed all sorts of guides, fudges and cludges to get a graphical desktop up and running on Linux. I was a Unix professional, and it was hard enough for me!
Scroll forward two decades and all has changed. Installing a Linux desktop OS to get a workstation up and running is a piece of cake! OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is my main workstation now, and all you do is download it, install it, and populate it with the latest software you need. No guides or help are required. I think that Fedora and Mint are just the same. Download, accept all defaults, install, and yo
Being an old Unix pro, FreeBSD is certainly appealing, and I have installed it several times over many years. However, it brings back memories (bad, painful memories) of the turn-of-the-century Linux experience. Actually, it is worse! I think my original RedHat install in 1999 gave me a graphical X session, which is more than FreeBSD does today.
I have no idea as to why anyone would want to run FreeBSD rather than Linux, other than for the feel of being different.
Alistair
PS: I did use FreeBSD on a Thinkpad in the early 2000s. It was faster than Linux. That was when APM was used. When ACPI took over, FreeBSD lost out, and it has been Linux ever since for me.
I was about to say that running X11 on Linux wasn’t that hard, even half a decade earlier, but then I remembered about XF86Config, Modelines and stuff. Ugh.
It was fine. A few years before that, you had to buy your hardware very carefully just to run BSD or Linux on it.
@Nico57
Mode setting in userland was a nightmare. It felt like it was no problem for years because there were tools like Xconfigurator and you could find your video card and monitor in the list of hardware. We were usually lucky that somebody had done the work for us. If our hardware was not there though…
If you have tried to install an ancient Linux (say Red Hat 4.2) to something like Proxmox, you have had to re-experience just how bad it really was. You are not going to find any of the emulated hardware in the drop downs.
A huge part of what has tamed Xorg config is that we all use Kernel Mode Setting, and Direct Rendering in the kernel and libinput for input. As long as you have the right drivers in the kernel, Xorg just works. From an X11 DDX standpoint, we are all using the same drivers. And of course, Wayland now uses KMS, DRM, and libinput as well.
I own 2 ThinkPads at the moment:
The W530 dual boots Windows 11 (for work) and FreeBSD. I use the Atheros Wifi and a W520 keyboard because I can. I can run Windows from FreeBSD within a VM and vice-versa, depending on what I am doing. It is the perfect FreeBSD machine and the battery actually lasts longer under FreeBSD than Windows.
My ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 (Xeon-ECC goodness) also dual boots FreeBSD and Windows, and with an even more interesting setup: I have 2x NVMes with ZFS (mirror), and I use it as storage for my Windows stuff via a VM. I can also boot FreeBSD and run Windows in a VM within it. However, I need different x.conf files depending on the use case, otherwise the battery life goes to poop. X CPU usage is also quite high on the 4K screen and the Intel GPU drivers suck (need to use modeset). The NVIDIA drivers work ok. So I needed to write some scripts to make sure I load the drivers and X depending on whether I am at home or on the go.
I stick to FreeBSD because I enjoy building the install from zero: I get no webcam or no touchpad support because I don’t need them. I use openbox without any frills because I don’t use any eye candy or window management features. Both W530 and P1 FLY and are the most responsible computers I’ve ever owned. It feels like playing games on an old ROM cartridge video game. It’s lean and I can focus at work.
But it is a PAIN to configure it this way and it was hell to get to an x.conf setup that worked properly with the hybrid gpus, etc..
I tried out the suggestions from user “thesaigoneer”. It went not well.
If you use SDDM (the normal Plasma display manager) you get unceremoniously and immediately logged out fast if you ever type Ctrl-C (e.g., to copy some text from the any app). This is what the he to as “The Ctrl+C bug”. The “solution” is to have a text login, then start Wayland/Plasma from the command line. Seriously? in 2025??? Or just use X. Like I said – it is like last-century Linux.
Follow up links on the “Ctrl+C bug” reports and it becomes very depressing. The Plasma people deny any knowledge of FreeBSD, so can’t (or won’t) follow it up. There are also requests for systemd logs (using journalctl), which shows just how out-of-touch with FreeBSD are the Plasma and Wayland developers!
Don’t get me wrong – I think FreeBSD is a fabulous OS, which does what it does extremely well. It is just way, way off being a platform for running Plasma on Wayland right now. (And I am not sure why FreeBSD should ever become a platform for Plasma on Wayland, since its developers’ time maybe spent on things closer to what it does best – being a rock-solid server platform.)
> PS: I did use FreeBSD on a Thinkpad in the early 2000s. It was faster than Linux. That was when APM was used. When ACPI took over, FreeBSD lost out, and it has been Linux ever since for me.
IMO, FreeBSD peaked as a desktop in the mid 2000’s. There was a time where everything was just right. I fell off the KDE+FreeBSD bandwagon in 2007, but PC-BSD was gaining steam and I remember some co-workers playing around with it and asking me for advice.
My last serious attempt at a FreeBSD desktop was a decade ago and I was surprised at how far the operating system had regressed by then.
GhostBSD ( https://ghostbsd.org/ ) is taking a serious run at building a FreeBSD desktop, and it seems to have a respectable set of partners and sponsors.
Apart from that, FreeBSD as a desktop is like FreeBSD as a server: it takes a little bit of work at the start, but afterwards it happily hums along until the hardware dies.
[ a FreeBSD desktop user since the demise of BSDi (2002) ]
“” I have no idea as to why anyone would want to run FreeBSD rather than Linux …”
Hmmm …. why does this sound like something from 20(?) years ago?
“” I have no idea as to why anyone would want to run _Linux rather than _Windows …”
I am more interested what do OpenBSD guys think about Wayland, since they maintain their own set of patches for X.Org server AFAIK.
Still, I think Wayland is the future for all Unix-like operating systems, but I am not sure what will happen to all these window managers that depend on X11.
> I am more interested what do OpenBSD
There has been a working implementation of sway for OpenBSD for a couple of years now.
That link gives me `https://codeberg.org/thesaigoneer/pages/src/branch/main/FreeBSD%20and%20Plasma%206%20install` gives me a HTTP 500