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Comment by timtadh | Hacker News Reader

really usb auto-mounting is shiny? that shit should just work.

Well, I meant in terms of "plug it in and it appears on your desktop". When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one. All I do on this box -- by design -- is code and spend too much time on e-mail/HN/reddit/etc.

If I need to work with a digital camera or a flash drive, I just reboot into Ubuntu and do it quickly there. FreeBSD is strictly for work (in theory).

I've only mounted stuff under FreeBSD maybe once in the past year or two, so it isn't even on the list for me.

So, from my point of view as a software developer who lives in Firefox and Emacs, it's shiny. Others differ. But for me, it's not required, at all.

> When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one.

How do you read docs without a web browser?

Why do you need a desktop to have a web browser? ¬_¬

Window management would be required to align the web browser with the terminal windows. A text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content.

A text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content.

It does, but after using one for a while, most of it seems superfluous.

He probably means he's using a simple window manager (twm, fvwm, etc) instead of the fancy everything-managers that include desktop functionality.

X alone doesn't provide that -- think back to Windows 3.1 days. You had a background, but not a desktop.

I figured something like that. I generally avoid using the term 'Window Manager' because none of twm, fvwm, blackbox, enlightenment, etc. only provide window management - there's almost always some included app launcher.

_pra is right. I use a very lightweight tiling window manager called dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/).

I do have a desktop background, though I rarely ever see it.

What I meant was I don't have a desktop in the Windows/Mac OS X sense -- a place with icons, documents, mounted drives and the like.

It's things like this that make me the impression that I should do the work and not the computer (the *BSD OS).

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