I have started using NomadBSD, and I am impressed by its portability and user friendly interface. I am considering making it my primary operating system for daily use but wanted to reach out for some advice and insights before fully committing. I have a few questions and would appreciate any guidance or recommendations from those who have more experience with this distribution.
Are there any specific tweaks or settings that you recommend to enhance performance on NomadBSD? I am using it on a mid-range laptop with 8GB of RAM and a solid state driv; and I am looking to maximize efficiency for tasks like web browsing; programming; and occasional multimedia editing.
What essential software packages do you suggest for someone using NomadBSD daily? I am particularly interested in lightweight applications that align well with the philosophy of BSD; ensuring stability and security.
How do you handle system updates and general maintenance on NomadBSD? Is there a preferred method or tool for keeping the system up to date without risking the stability of the OS?
Given that NomadBSD is designed for portability; what are the best practices for backing up and restoring system configurations and data? Are there any tools or scripts specifically suited for NomadBSD that you would recommend?
I am excited to learn more from the community and hear about your experiences using NomadBSD in a daily use scenario. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Most RAM consumed by Firefox, Thunderbird, and also LibreOffice. For everyday use, you can install lightweight Qutebrowser (or the more common Otter-browser). Without uninstalling Firefox — which your bank and other monopolies can require sometimes. Both of these alternative browsers work smoothly for me. Instead of LibreOffice suite you can use much smaller Abiword, Gnumeric, and so on.
A mid-range laptop should do the job and 8GB RAM is enough for most of daily tasks. The window manager of NomadBSD is Openbox and needs less resources than the heavy GNOME or KDE desktop environments.
I use LibreOffice and the current Firefox 130. For dimming the brightness of the laptop display I installed “gammy”. For editing my photos I start the very powerful GIMP.
If you are missing an app you can install every FreeBSD package. My NomadBSD runs very stable and I don’t miss a thing.
Unfortunately, NomadBSD doesn’t have Openbox anymore.
It now uses the XFCE desktop environment. It’s not as big as GNOME or KDE, but it’s bigger than Openbox (which is just a window manager).
NomadBSD 132R is the last version supporting Openbox. It’s not available anymore from the main website/mirrors, but I saved a downloadable image here: Where to download 132R and 131R - #6 by gmacar
Thanks. Just dropped back into the forum to post that I managed to install mtpaint via cli (as root) … pkg install mtpaint … part of which involved (automated) upgrade of pkg from version 1 to version 2
My own system usage requirements are quite light, mostly browsing, on line email (yahoo/google mail), online music (youtubes), some occasional light image editing (mtpaint is great for resizing images etc.). Plus spreadsheets and relatively infrequent documents - where I might use LibreOffice, but absent that online google-docs is fine (write letters locally in simple text files, post them into google-docs, format and print to pdf for downloading/forwarding). Makes the need to install libreoffice pretty much redundant.
I keep data files totally separate from system files, not one for keeping userid/passwords/bookmarks in the browser either. I like the idea of booting a clean/fresh system that hasn’t been used to browse any/everywhere over prior months that might have been exploited via a single program bug at some point. So I download the ufs version of nomadbsd and dd that to usb, boot/setup that (UK location, wifi, firefox set to use duckduckgo search engine and a few other tweaks such as 96 dpi to 120 dpi (aging eyes)) and then shut that down and dd a image of the usb stick. So at any time later I can then re dd that image back to the usb to be back at a clean/fresh (configured) version again - that I usually do once/month prior to doing online banking/paying bills. I’d rather use older versions of programs (firefox/whatever) that are known to be clean, to go direct to my bank - than using the latest/updated firefox in a system that may have been compromised.
I like/prefer freeBSD over linux and nomadbsd fully worked out of the box for me, other than it not auto-detecting my graphics card, so I just boot with the 7 7 1 1 boot menu combination that disables auto graphics detection and boots fine to gui desktop. I could disable that in rc.conf but then the usb might be less portable into other systems/laptops.
My thanks goes out to all of the nomadbsd team for producing one of the greatest usb boot systems out there. Just works (very) well, even on my 10 year old laptop (4GB, using unbranded cheap USB2 stick in a USB2 port).
@vladas You can uninstall Firefox and replace it with Dooble or qutebrowser, both are powered by QtWebEngine which is basically embedded blue Chrome (aka. Chromium). I recommend Dooble over Qutebrowser for the average user though because it is more user-friendly than qutebrowser. You have at least the option in Dooble to use a mouse after all.
Another bonus with Dooble is that it is a 1:1 replacement for your file manager too so that’s neat!
To install Dooble from FreeBSD Packages/Ports Collection, you issue the following commands:
# to search for dooble, type:
user@pc ~ > pkg search dooble
# to install it:
user@pc ~ > pkg install dooble
Congrats for installing Dooble! Now onwards to put it to use!
