Coupla questions on DragonFly as a desktop OS

[Michael Neumann]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 08:04:39AM +0000, John Long wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have some miscellaneous questions on the way to finding a new desktop
> OS. Thanks to anybody who would help with this:


Hi John,

Welcome to DragonFly :).

In general, don't expect DragonFly to be as polished as other systems,
especially when it comes to desktop use.

I run it with success for a couple of years as my main desktop and I am
happy with it.

> Acrobat reader: I have a lot of manuals in .pdf format and I haven't
> found anything I can tolerate other than acroread. I'm not saying there
> isn't anything good, I just haven't seen it. I don't need forms support
> or change tracking or any fancy stuff. I want 2-up display and I need
> internal links to work. I also have a bunch of .djvu but the djview
> reader is mostly ok.

I use evince and I love it. okular is good IIRC when you need to
bookmark pages.

> Computer languages: Are Fortran and Ada available? I looked in the
> dports directory at UK Mirror Service and I didn't find any of the
> common names (gfortran, gcc-ada, gnat (the language, not the bug
> tracker)).

Ada should have damn good support as J. Marino uses it on DragonFly to
write synth and ravenadm, two package tools.

lang/gcc6-aux supports both Ada and Fortran.

> Virtualization: Is there a way to run Linux in a VM?
> 
> HAMMER2: Is it possible to set up a root mirror in the installer and if
> not can I add a disk to mirror the root after installing? I don't know
> anything about HAMMER/HAMMER2 but I use ZFS on Solaris and I am hoping
> to get some of the same management features with HAMMER2, mostly the
> stuff about filesystems taking only the space they need, and having
> good software mirroring that makes it easy to pull out a bad drive,
> swap in a new one, and everything works with no data loss.

HAMMER2 is great, but for backup I still prefer the mirror-stream
capability of HAMMER. Currently I backup HAMMER2 using rsync.

HAMMER/HAMMER2 uses logical replication instead of replication on the
block level. With HAMMER1 I was able to stream any change to the
filesystem to one or more slaves in "realtime". HAMMER2 doesn't
currently have these features.

You have to setup these things manually. For HAMMER1 this was pretty
easy. As I said, for HAMMER2 you have to use (e.g.) rsync to backup your
files.

> Are web browsers like Opera and Chrome available? Don't get me wrong, I
> hate google bitterly, but Chrome's translation feature is handy when it
> works. I like Opera's UI but I can live with Firefox.

Chrome works best on DragonFly. Firefox is currently no longer in the
ports, I guess because of Rust.

Regards,

  Michael