After more than a year with NomadBSD on my laptop, I decided yesterday to go back to vanilla FreeBSD (13.2-Release). I still have NomadBSD on a 1TB USB3 nvme drive that I’ll continue to use and develop, so I’ll still be lurking around occasionally. I just found that some of the applications that were packaged with nomad simply didn’t function well, at least on my laptop (HP Inspiron 7569). I have gone back to FreeBSD, so I can use my laptop as a daily driver and have it configured exactly as I want, with applications with which I am more familiar. I found the customizations in nomad were getting in my way, rather than helping.
I appreciate the interaction with the forum members.
It seemed like several of the settings apps for the desktop and wm weren’t functioning correctly, stepping on each other. Tint2 didn’t work well, I couldn’t get the desktop and workspace controls to work right, couldn’t pin apps to the desktop taskbar. Some stuff I just lived with. Last week I apparently accidentally reset something that moved my desktop workspaces and rearranged my taskbars. I went through every single desktop and task bar setting and could not get it back the way I had it. There are just too many customization apps for the desktop space for my taste and it seemed some of them were somewhat redundant. Additionally, I prefer to use pkg update to the nomad update tool, because there are some packages that are not available to nomad, but after trying pkg update once and breaking nomad, I stuck to the provided app. I pretty much just have xfce4 on my FreeBSD13.2 installation with several of my preferred apps installed. Pretty basic and light.
In the near future I will go onto my usb installation and try to provide some specific examples.
I use both, FreeBSD 13.2 installed with Mate on my Laptop, and NomadBSD on my USB SSD. And I like both equal. On FreeBSD, I use the ports collection for updates and installation, and on Nomad I use the pkg manager.
On FreeBSD I use VirtualBox with Haiku OS, but I try to get Bhyve running with it. It works, but the network does not work. Seems to be difficult.
So far, I got everything working on NomadBSD and FreeBSD. Both are FreeBSD.
Well, to me, it was also a great pleasure to try out NomadBSD whereever and whenever I could. But it did not serve my use case very well, having a mobile desktop that I could carry around and use it anytime, anywhere for any purpose is great but one that crashes or is in any other way unusable, as OG @tthenrie pointed out, is not very helpful.
It was also a hindrance to me to learn the principles of UNIX and Unix-like operating systems, a topic in which I became interested during my time on NomadBSD, and also get deep into C/C++/D programming. Maybe I will come back to this phenomenal operating system once I get a new microSD card or repurposing an old one and commit it for a NomadBSD install.
At this point I will give many thanks to @mk1 and @lme for creating such an unique and beautifully designed operating system, devoting their free time to develop it, among many other things, such as being active in porting applications to FreeBSD and creating new ones for NomadBSD. I wish you ultimately luck and I hope you succeed in your endeavors. I will still attach myself to this forum as I am interested in the direction the NomadBSD project wants to go and help new users out with their problems. Here I am now with my last words (in German):
Nochmals tausend Dank, dass ihr beide ( @mk1 und @lme ) uns ein schön aussehendes, einzigartiges und mächtiges Betriebssystem beschert habt, dass mobil wie auch stationär einsetzbar nur so von Benutzbarkeit und Eleganz strotzt. Ich hoffe, dass ihr beide weiter fleißig an NomadBSD tüftelt und mit jedem Release NomadBSD ein kleines Stück besser macht, für den Anfänger, für den Umsteiger aus der Linux-Welt wie auch dem PowerUser, der eine relativ einfache, minimalistische, aber dennoch leicht zu konfiguriende und vertraute Unix-Umgebung haben möchte. Ich wünsche euch viel Glück und Erfolg bei eurem Vorhaben.
