Ars Technica article on FreeBSD new user experience

[Kyle Evans]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 1:12 AM John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
>
> Kyle Evans wrote this message on Thu, Apr 09, 2020 at 14:34 -0500:
> > On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 2:05 PM Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Jim Salter has an article in Ars Technica discussing his experience
> > > with FreeBSD 12.1 as a desktop:
> > > https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-review-freebsd-12-1-release/
> > >
> > > There are some points in there that might involve misunderstanding,
> > > but there are also a number of real issues raised about the experience
> > > a new (or newish) desktop FreeBSD user will have. It will be a good
> > > idea for us to examine these, and offer advice or corrections if
> > > appropriate, and otherwise look how we can improve the FreeBSD
> > > experience for new users.
> >
> > Random small collection of thoughts I had after reading this:
>
> [...]
>
> > 2. re: default shell and niceties: complete agreement, IMO we should
> > at least have basically usable history at a minimum
>
> Hmm...  I wonder if this is a terminal issue or something.  I do
> remember /bin/sh not working w/ up/down arrow, but I just tried in
> a jail, and up/down arrows work fine.  Also, I normally just "set -o vi"
> using /bin/sh to give me vi keys in the shell and then it just works...
>
> Guess more exploration is needed of a fresh install to figure it out...
>

My memory here is incredibly hazy, it may be that I was scarred by
history not persisting at all across sessions or something like this;
I quickly installed zsh and never looked back.