desktop for bsd

[Christian Walther]

Hi Marshall,

just like all the Linux distribution you're free to choose your own
desktop. It's not like Windows or Mac OS, where the GUI is actually
bound to the Operating System. FreeBSD is the base system which
doesn't make any assumption of the GUI you'd like to use.
So you can use KDE with FreeBSD, but you can use GNOME or XFCE, too.
If you want to use XFCE, you should compile it using the ports system.
There is a meta port in /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4 that downloads and
installs all xfce-packages.
The rest depends on your configuration. If you use a Display manager
(xdm, gdm), so that you have a graphical login after system startup,
you need to configure a session.
If you use the startx command you can edit ~/.xinitrc so that xfce is
started. The file should contain something like

exec xfce4-session

HTH
Christian