Thread: DragonflyBSD
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Old 18th December 2013
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lucas34 View Post
It's good as a desktop?Flash player works?What is your opinion about the DragonFlyBSD?Share your experience!
I used it for awhile as my laptop OS until OpenBSD 5.4 fixed something that previously prevented it from installing on that machine. Don't know about Flash player, since I don't feel a need for it. Generally it worked pretty well for my needs. There were one or two minor glitches, but nothing too serious. During this time I tried DragonFly, NetBSD and Slackware and found the latter to my preference with DragonFly in second place. Interestingly my attempt to install OpenBSD (until 5.4) and FreeBSD failed on this laptop and DragonFly's install (which is slightly rough in places -- pay close attention to their documentation) worked perfectly devicewise.

Hammer though is really cool as said already and could be a reason for you to prefer DragonFly to other options if you don't already have a strong preference for something. If someone ported Hammer (I or II) to OpenBSD I'd totally use it (even in early going for testing cause I'd love to see that). The only trouble was I had a disk too small. Not below the 50 GB recommendation, but small enough that I had to pay close attention to pruning away old snapshots.

I also found I didn't like pkgsrc, but now they're changing to something called dports which looks good.

I must admit my moving off of DragonFly to Slackware was for emotional reasons not anything technically wrong with DragonFly. First I read here a nice interview with Pat and liked the guy so wanted to use his distro for awhile. Second, I got myself into a weird place psychologically with DragonFly. If I'd simply used their stable releases and these days binary packages from dports it would have worked quite well for me. Instead I took this attitude that I had to figure out how to stay fairly current with both dragonfly src and pkgsrc packages. Failing to do that effectively I took on a kind of madness where I figured for all the effort I was expending I'd do packages my own way from source and develop my own minimal packaging system to suit my preferences and that would make use of Hammer snapshots to deal with backing out of messes. Of course, that's a big job. Then on top of that I had some idea DragonFly needed developers and that might be a place for me to contribute. But then again, really being useful to them beyond little patches that wouldn't take that much longer for the dev with access to fix himself than to look at my patch, lots of work (not to mention innate intelligence) to get to that point. So in the end I felt like there was all this weight on my using DFly, that I was spending time -- and felt like I should spend more time -- on things when it came right down to it I'm not sure I really wanted to do after all or that just made me feel foolish when I reflected on what I was doing. So I was probably walking away from that (myself) more so than from anything DragonFly developers were doing.

This is just my long winded way of encouraging you to try it out. It's a nice project. You may like it.
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