Ah nice, looks pretty comfy!
Steps I followed after exiting
bsdinstall and booting in for the first time (roughly). JFYI: wheel, video, operator, and games are the groups I added myself to during the install process.
0. Log into your user account, then go
su - to switch to root. Save
sudo and
doas for later.
1. Edit
/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf and change "quarterly" to "latest."
ee is FreeBSD's equivalent to
nano
2. Execute
pkg update then
pkg upgrade to update your binary package tools.
3. Execute
freebsd-update fetch and
freebsd-update install to update the base system, then reboot
4. Execute
pkg install xorg. I don't know, nor do I care enough to know how to install a minimal Xorg environment in FreeBSD. Just install the meta package, you'll be fine.
5. Double check the
Handbook to see what graphics driver you need, then install it accordingly. For me, it's
drm-kmod since I've got an AMD graphics card. Once
drm-kmod is installed, I ran
sysrc kld_list+=amdgpu to have
amdgpu load on next boot.
6. Time to install a desktop environment. I went with
pkg install cinnamon lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter, then
sysrc dbus_enable="YES" and
sysrc lightdm_enable="YES". Don't forget to add
proc /proc procfs rw 0 0 to
/etc/fstab. Reboot once the install is complete.
7. Fingers crossed when you're rebooting, If you did everything correctly, you'll boot into a
hideously minimal LightDM, log in with your user account, and you'll find a black Cinnamon taskbar with hardly any applications. Hey, at least you have
xterm to get everything else going
It's ugly as sin, highly utilitarian, lacks the polish that Fedora and Mint give Cinnamon, and I'm nowhere
near close to finished (still gotta get the fonts, XDG user directories, my vidya, groups, permissions, and such set up) but y'know what? I fucking
love this setup. It manages to hit that same satisfaction as Arch once did, except you're not deciding between doing things manually or just running
archinstall. Oh, and you're starting from a text console and booting up to a graphical environment in under 15 minutes. If you skipped
archinstall altogether and tried to do this all by hand, it would've taken you
at least an hour, probably longer depending on how much you need to refer back to the ArchWiki.
Seriously, I cannot emphasise enough how incomplete yet also oddly satisfying this setup is. It's like when you reach that threshold in Arch or Gentoo where you installed X11 and you need to run
startx to see if TWM will actually function correctly, then you just install the rest of your crap through
xterm. Except here, my sound is autodetected and I can read the Handbook off Firefox.