Re: Installing Signal

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 1:28 PM Alexander Burke <alex@alexburke.ca> wrote:

> If I wanted to be forced to build everything from source, I'd run Gentoo.
>
> As a donor to the project, it grieves me to say that the lack of
> non-outdated packages for tier-1 desktop applications excludes FreeBSD as a
> bona fide desktop OS.
>
> It's a shame.
>

Non-outdated packages? I run 14.1 on my server and all packages are usually
updated at least every other day. Packages are normally built on Tuesday,
Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. A full build of all packages takes about 40
hours, though distribution of packages to global mirrors can take as much
as two added days. Most builds take less than a day and another day to
distribute. That is a LOT more current than packages on Mint. Of course,
that means using LATEST packages. QUARTERLY is updated the first day of
every quarter, so can get behind by a few months. It's up to you to decide
which to use.

The base ports which are used to build the packages are a bigger problem,
but things like compilers (llvm/gcc/electron/ and major ports like chromium
(and related ones like ungoogled Chromium) and firefox are seldom more than
a week behind and are sometime in ports before the official release, also
better than Mint. Graphics and other ports that a hardware coupled do lag,
mostly due to lack of manpower familiar enough with the hardware to
maintain quickly can make updates slow.

I'll admit that I don't know exactly what counts as a Tier-1 desktop
application.
-- 
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman@gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683