BSD Cafe Billboard

I apparently found your original post on Mastodon first:

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@nuintari/116453958107402129

Oh boy. I'll make the popcorn.

Not a BSD desktop, but long before I switched to BSD for such roles, I had wildly different views about my desktop. Toolbars and Dock Apps everywhere, and a mantra of, "You can never find a terminal fast enough when you are angry!" Hence all the penguins, each one of those icons opens an aterm. A transparent aterm at that! I used to actually have icons, and backgrounds, and menus. I used 9 virtual work areas, the top row was for browsers, this all predated tabs in web browsers, so I tended to rock six open windows. Middle row was for communications, Gaim, Licq, mutt, etc. The bottom row was reserved for whatever I was actually worked on, so it was usually just full of terminal windows. Here we see me thrashing the SMACx demo by actually winning the game inside the 100 turn limit. The background is Forth Day from Digital Blasphemy. The WM is AfterStep. I actually had several highly rated AfterStep themes on themes.org in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I'll see if I can find a screenshot of Mesas, that one was gorgeous.

Sometime before I switched to FreeBSD as my desktop of choice, I converted to minimalism using PWM, and later Ion. These days, I use Notion. A tiny Netbook that I ran with scrotwm due to its seriously tiny screen is what converted me over to tiling WMs. I realized that toolbars were just wasted space, and backgrounds and transparent windows were just distractions for my already easily distracted ADHD brain. The rest of history. Plain, ordinary, most user hostile history.

More than likely it would be a very easy install. I'm running a Dell R720xd in my house, and it handles FreeBSD just fine.

Just make sure the card supports passthrough/JBOD/HBA mode for the disks. ZFS is much happier when it can control the disks directly.

My workstation is hardly exciting. It is Notion WM running on FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE. Shown are a pair of browsers showing freebsd.org and your post, and a bunch of xterms running top, fastfetch, and cbonsai. Tabbed in the background are various ssh sessions and thunderchicken. I keep things minimal, no toolbars, no buttons, just a handful of keyboard shortcuts and a black background. This is all stretched over four monitors. My left two screens are for my browsers and communications. The bottom right is generally my work area, and the top right is mission-specific, or just used to keep an eye on things.

A few things I always do.

1. Use ZFS. Unless you are severely memory constrained, ZFS is the sane choice. I even use ZFS for single disk installations.

2. Set a ZFS refreservation to prevent the disk from filling up completely. ZFS does NOT like full disks.

zfs create -o refreservation=<5-10 percent of total pool space> <poolname>/reserved\n

3. Enable automagick ZFS scrubbing:

sysrc -f /etc/periodic.conf daily_scrub_zfs_enable=YES
sysrc -f /etc/periodic.conf daily_scrub_zfs_default_threshold=7

4. My "standard" set of sysctl.conf settings, most of these can be set during installation. Most of them are security oriented, the last one is because the ZFS default is almost always too low.

security.bsd.see_other_uids=0
security.bsd.see_other_gids=0
security.bsd.see_jail_proc=0
security.bsd.unprivileged_read_msgbuf=0
security.bsd.unprivileged_proc_debug=0
kern.randompid=1
vfs.zfs.vdev.min_auto_ashift=12

5. enable jumbo frames, sizing is card dependent, and changes if I am using VLANs or not. But I aim for interfaces that are directly speaking IP to have an MTU of 9000, because damn near everything supports that.

ex:

ifconfig_ix0="up mtu 9100 ... "
create_args_vlan1005="vlan 1005 vlandev ix0 mtu 9000 ... "

6. Disable various NIC offloading capabilities. I have never seen them work well under load. Your mileage may vary, and admittedly I haven't retested this since probably 13.something-RELEASE, but I was getting an order of magnitude better performance with it all switched off:

ifconfig_ix0="... -rxcsum -rxcsum6 -txcsum -txcsum6 -tso -lro -vlanhwtag -vlanhwtso -vlanhwcsum -mextpg

7. Disable password authentication in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
PasswordAuthentication no
UsePAM no

7. Install rocinante, and bastille if this is going to be a jail host. I try to keep my base systems fairly lean.

Login: nuintari, Name: The Psychotic Network Ferret
Directory: /home/nuintari, Shell: /bin/tcsh
Office: Anyplace my ass fits that has wifi.
On since sometime in 1989.
New legitimate mail received Wed Apr 1 1:13 2026 (EDT)
New spam received Sat Apr 4 09:07 2026 (EDT)
Project:
Building networks for fun and profit.
Plan:
Level 0x2F, Neutral Evil, Technomage. I love UNIX systems, especially the BSDs and the Solaris family. I'm also a musician, historian, and a pretty decent cook. I have apparently gotten into gardening, photography, and bird-watching lately. Lover of fuzzy animals of all sorts, but especially dogs and ferrets(go figure). I run an MPLS/EVPN network in my house, ostensibly for "fun." My career spans over twenty five years, the vast majority working for ISP networks.

You have new mail.

I am so basic, my background has been xsetroot -solid black since about 2004. I just can't handle the visual distractions.

I had the LTE Lite 4/33C, that was my portable machine through highschool and a good chunk of college. I was still using it in 2000, 2001ish. My next laptop was.... somewhat faster.

I dig it! Thanks for creating this @stefano !