Hi all!

As it is indeed quite quiet on the mailinglist I thought I might share my 4 months of FreeBSD Desktop here :-)

What I especially like on *BSD is that there are no surprises. Things simply work as doctumented. There is valid documentation and a handbook that covers almost all things you'd want to know. But if an application is not in ports, things get ugly. And that's the down side of FreeBSD: no TDE.

In quest for a usable desktop environment I went over GNOME (argh! Now I know again why I hate it) over XFCE (too gnomish) to LXDE (too windows like) and KDE4 (yes, that was a rainy day full of desperation. Just like visiting a home-improvement market: you almost get what you need, but in the end of the day you've spent a lot of time and mony and didn't get the job done). 
Days got better after purging these nice DEs: openbox was an improvement but in the end FVWM came and stayed. Now my FVWM looks quite simillar to my TDE setup on wheezy :-)

But there are some things that I cannot quite replace:
kmail: the one and only mailclient that has a working maildir implementation and usable GUI. This is the one and only application I did not find a usable replacement for.
kpdf: slim, working PDF viewer. I've also tried mupdf (very good and fast, but I cannot mark and copy text), epdfviewer (ok, but quite broken copy function, hangs on pdfs with big images), okular (slow like a slug, pulls in 1GB dependecies, full of clutter, otherwise ok) and evince (well, GNOME), non is a match. I use mupdf+epdfviewer for now.
konqueror: pcmanfm is a usable replacement, but needs quite a bit of work till it does it's job.

So, it's 30°C outside, rainy days all gone,  and I'm here on FreeBSD with FVWM and kmail running in a VM ... and desperatly waiting for Slavec to sort out the -fPIC compiler issue on FreeBSD :-)

Nik

-- 
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.