Man, I am pretty disappointed in the participation in this forum. I have been using NomadBSD for several weeks now on a Dell Inspiron 2-in-1 7569 laptop, as a live-USB installation and I have liked it. However, there are just too many pre-loaded packages that don’t work out of the box. I have been acquainted with FreeBSD since 2007, but got away from it for a number of years. I have been moving back to it after a few years of macOS and linux experience, but I decided to look at some of the BSD offerings other than plain vanilla FreeBSD (I was a pcbsd user when it was in it’s birthing stages), because my BSD skills are minimal at best and quite rusty. I thought having a working system preconfigured would be the way to go.
NomadBSD feels like an “almost” OS. I like it. I like the general configuration of it and most of the options preconfigured into it, but it really bothers me when I click on an application that came pre-installed and nothing happens. Ask for help and there’s no response. Some of the applications are not very good at what they do to begin with.
Take viewnoir for example. I just uploaded several photos from my FreeBSD NAS that came from my Macbook Pro. They are .jpg photos. On GhostBSD, Arch Linux, and even HaikuOS, they opened right up, but on NomadBSD, with viewnoir, I get an error message that says the photos cannot be opened because they are not the proper format. I installed feh to try that, but it won’t start. I’ll have to dig into it to see what’s wrong now.
It took me several days to learn how to configure my laptop with device hints to get the onboard speakers to work. I asked for help on this forum, but…crickets…crickets…
I think I may end up either going with GhostBSD or just plain vanilla FreeBSD with xfce on it. If, by chance, I stick with NomadBSD (I like the idea of having it on a thumb drive as well as my laptop’s SSD) I think I will just stick with the FreeBSD.org forums for help.
If anybody reads this…and if you are one of the developers…it would be really nice if there were a simple way to sync between the thumb drive version and the SSD install by simply plugging in the USB to the laptop. Maybe something like a button on the install menu “[Install] [Shell] [LiveCd] [Sync]” or something. I’m sure there’s a way to configure something like that with rsync, but it would take me weeks to figure it out. It would be very useful to be able to carry my computer-on-a-thumb-drive with me while traveling, then come home and plug it into my laptop or desktop and sync everything up.
I would have thought at least the developers would frequent this board and offer helpful suggestions, but, as it turns out, I am about the most active member on here lately!
