Ars Technica article on FreeBSD new user experience

[Ed Maste]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2020 at 15:34, Kyle Evans <kevans at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> 2. re: default shell and niceties: complete agreement, IMO we should
> at least have basically usable history at a minimum

Complete agreement here, although in 13-CURRENT /bin/sh is
surprisingly usable. I'm normally a zsh user, but after using /bin/sh
on a new laptop I've found !$ is the only thing I strongly miss.

> 3. re: `pkg search xorg` -- that makes sense, given "pkg search xorg
> returns too many hits to fit on a single page of a text-mode console".

Indeed, I think the article is technically incorrect, but the
usability problem is the same; if `pkg search xorg` returns more than
a screenfull of results and the desired one scrolled away, does it
really matter that it's actually present?

There are some usability improvements that could be made with pkg /
pkg search, but really a new user should trivially be able to get a
graphical environment running, before they'd have any reason to `pkg
search` anything.