Productivity with FBSD, or: "portupgrade" vs. virus scans....

[Kevin Kinsey]

Hello,

Length/content-warning:  Please excuse my excessive grumbling, if that's 
what it is.  Lots of this is background; material for discussion is at 
the bottom.  I've edited it a good deal, but it's still wordy.

Psychological-bent-warning:  I need a vacation, and will take one soon. 
  Also, for various reasons, business stats aren't looking good yet this 
year (or much of last).
---

I'd like to hear opinions from those (and there are many, AFAICT) who 
use FreeBSD as a personal workstation, if you have time to respond.

My computer is my workstation _and_ my little company (and family) 
server.  Lately I've been (perhaps unjustly?) *feeling* I'd be just as 
well off to put this box in a corner to serve and purchase another MS 
exec's daughter an iPod.

I've been an (outspoken?) FBSD advocate and desktop user for 3 years 
now, give or take.   FBSD makes a great gen-purpose machine - stable OS, 
the ports collection is wonderful and FBSD's full-featuredness puts 
WinXP to shame when it comes to networking, troubleshooting, and 
standards-compliant web development (which is mostly what I do besides 
typical communication and research functions).  I can do stuff in a 
heartbeat that coworkers who are MS-only users have to search for apps 
to do.  And the only way to beat the license cost would be if the 
Project paid me ;-)

But I'm having trouble keeping up with desktop ports.  A couple of apps 
necessary for my "comfy GUI" (xfce4-panel is one, seamonkey has been 
another) are/have dump(ing/ed) core regularly.  At least twice in the 
past year some element(s) of my environment was broken to the point 
where I decided to simply "make deinstall" in /usr/ports rather than try 
and fix the issues.  Maybe I missed something in UPDATING <?>, but I've 
not noted anything ex post facto.  It could be that I simply get tired 
of sitting at the desk - maybe I need more management scripts (already 
have some that make "buildworld, etc." almost totally pain-free).

Every once in a while (generally while upgrading ports/packages), I look 
over there and see our single Windows machine and think, "we never have 
to run `portupgrade` on that boxen... and I'm smart enough to avoid virii."

My box does *everything* except provide workstation facilities to my 
family and co-workers.  Company intranet and site development server, 
gateway/fw/nat/proxy, POP/IMAP and MTA, SAMBA, DNS, rsync for backups, 
print services via apsfilter over lpr, and, my desktop with XFCE4.  I 
have set up scripts to handle rebuilding -STABLE, usually about monthly. 
  I have the CD Burner we use; the only thing we need Win* for are the 
kid's games and school apps, as a "test box" for clients and web 
previewing in MSIE, and the fact that other family members (and one 
co-worker) all prefer "known territory".

Needless to say, the FBSD box needs to be "up and running" almost all 
the time.  It seems lately that maintaining the many ports providing all 
these services is taking away valuable time that should be spent *really 
working*.

Perhaps I need a more reliable Internet link; packet radio occasionally 
(at least with my current provider) seems to experience sharp drops in 
performance, which makes tarball-fetching take a long time during the 
day, whilst the fact that there are so many ports installed means 
"portupgrade -arR --fetch-only" takes more than an overnight, also.

I've had a co-worker with an extremely stable FBSD desktop; stable in 
the sense that, everything GUI-wise worked as expected for month after 
month after month.  But the hardware was borken and wouldn't build 
world, so we never upgraded the OS or ports/packages, and apparently got 
a "good scale" on it the first time.

If you're a desktop FBSD user:

How do you keep up with ports?

    *Do you have (or have you, at some time, had) much trouble?

    *If you have trouble, do you accept it as a "cost" of using FreeBSD?

How often do you upgrade your ports/packages?

Any suggestions on what I might do differently?

    *Should I quit updating FBSD except for major point releases?

    *Should we upgrade the server-type ports and leave the desktop apps 
alone when we get a "stable" configuration there?

    *How dangerous is it to be using outdated ports (particularly the 
servers)?

To sum up, I doubt I'll jettison FBSD from my desktop, but I wish to be 
assured I'm not wasting time doing what amounts to "busy work" to keep 
my 3rd-party apps going when I could sit at the next desk and probably 
worry less about that....

Thanks for your time, thoughts and strategies,

Kevin Kinsey
-- 
Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be
tolerated until they acquire some sense.
		-- William Phelps