Who exactly was talking about a retarded normie strawman? Not me.
And I pointed out how automount sometimes just fails, either down to the distro not even including it or it failing for bizarre reasons.
Both of these things bother me immensely based on my own usage across the past 20 years. It makes basic file tasks with external drives annoying.
So yeah it was pretty fucking dumb.
just general advice for you. and anyone that doesn't know. This is something I've learned just because I do use external storage, usb's external drives, and have multiple internal drives.
If you want it to just work. You will need to make sure a few things are installed. Obviously your file manager of choice. Then you will want udisks2, and also gvfs. At least if you are using a gtk based file manager. for kde based or qt stuff, idk, since I mostly use gtk stuff. But you will almost certainly need udisks2, and it likely will either tell you somewhere if you need something else, or pull it in automatically. If you are using thunar, it will have thunar-volman which like the name suggests is a plugin for it, that manages volumes. You can adjust your settings with that. Others will have their own way. but if you have those programs it should take care of it.
if you have those, also polkit and a polkit agent helps too because you will likely need authentication for mounting certain drives (like internal drives) in a gui, but that depends on what you are doing.
@khaine I use FreeBSD as a couple of fileshares. I really like it. Haven't tried using it as a desktop.
I think the use case you have been using it for is probably the right way to use freebsd. On the desktop. Overall just sticking to linux. At least for now, is my general advice.
There might be some people, with specific hardware that is covered well. That happen to only use software on the desktop that's covered well also. But when you start to do anything a bit outside of that. It starts to become a real pain. In general, I just find it to be a worse experience than linux.
And they have the linux compatibility layer, But to me, it seems a bit iffy. When I used it. It had all kinds of random issues. And was just a headache. So if something you happen to use, is supported through that. I recommend just not bothering.
Some day, in the future. Freebsd at least, might make some advances in the desktop space. The problem, from what I've seen. Is while people might like the idea of how the bsd's do things. Like having a cohesive kernel and userland. Not having a "bloated" kernel. Sticking more to the unix philosophy. Those things in some ways are actually why it just doesn't work as well as linux right now. Also the license.
Linux has a lot of companies, hardware, and software contributing code to it. Getting drivers into the kernel. And that means almost any hardware is going to be supported. Obviously not everything, but a ton of stuff. And as a desktop users. That is something really appealing.
The unix philosophy gets in the way, because it means if something isn't portable, they won't add it, or at least their will be a lot of objections to it. Some things that will let you get better performance, or more convenience for users. That would need to be written for how the freebsd kernel does things. Like an init system for the freebsd kernel. I'm not a huge fan of systemd (not because it doesn't work well though), but it did bring things that make peoples lives easier, and is able to do a lot of things in the background that make developers lives easier. But systemd is very much not portable. Which is something that has stopped freebsd from moving towards some kind of their own more advanced init system with hooks for its kernel. At least from my understanding, and hearing talks from people.
Then the license. the agpl, Over time really gave linux a huge advantage over the bsd's . Them having their more permissive license let companies. Like famously apple ( from what I understand it used a lot of freebsd code for macos), and getting very little back as a thank you (they did at least hire some of the devs, though you could say they took the best devs, who were no longer working on freebsd). Meanwhile, you have android coming from linux. But because the gpl requires the code used from it also be open source. It ended up getting a lot of help back from the companies that ended up relying on linux over the years.
Along with the license. Because Linus ended up being willing to support any hardware he could. And accept code from companies, it has given Linux a huge advantage.
I'm sure there are a lot of other things that ended up leading to it too, but this is all I'm willing to type about something no one asked for.
