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New Arrival

Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2019 4:41 am
by Artim
Hello,

I am new to BSD, coming from "easy" Linux (MX, Xubuntu, etc). What brings me to explore BSD is more than just curiosity, but a little concern about two things:

1. Systemd and it's ever-increasing creep into every part of the OS, and future plans for systemd to "phone home" to God-only-knows who, to report on every little thing the computer does.

2. Microsoft has jumped into Linux with both feet, in a sense "taking over" the Linux Foundation and buying out GitHub.

My concerns are not paranoid fears, just precautionary feelings about what could happen to affect the future of free operating systems. Testing BSD gives me a sense of putting a little extra distance between myself and Microsoft and between me and systemd. I certainly did not expect it to be as easy as it is!

I searched both the software station and these forums for my favorite Internet suite, Seamonkey. It isn't listed among available software for GhostBSD, and the forum posts on Seamonkey are more than a year old, and they don't describe how to add or install it. I'd really like to, since Seamonkey does what both Firefox and Thunderbird do, but with thousands fewer lines of code than Firefox! It's lean and fast. I'd sure like to use it with GhostBSD, and I'd be grateful for someone to show me how to get it.

Thanks in advance from a newbie!

Re: New Arrival

Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2019 12:43 pm
by hunghung
I fear about systemd more than Microsoft. MS is just another for profit corporation, not very different from Google, Facebook,... But systemd is designed to be easy exploit by anyone that want to, not just MS, so I found the hatred for MS is not only paranoid but also ignorant. Distributions could use systemd to sold data to Google, to Tencent, to the US, to China, to everyone paid them money. It's a real danger.

About Seamonkey, there are already many discussion on the FreeBSD forums about it, the answer from the developers is they just follow their discipline, the Seamonkey port is vulnerable and unmaintained, so they delete it. Upstream project of Seamonkey also face many problems, for a long time they've not provide new version of Seamonkey. You could see, Seamonkey stucked with 2.49 too long. I found their decision to delete Seamonkey is reasonable.

I also love Seamonkey. It's the only browsers I found really portable. It still run on Windows XP without any problems. But the lacked of add ons when Mozilla switched to Web Extensions caused it to be not useful anymore. They're still stuck with the code base from Firefox 52 esr. The only extension I use with it is UblockOrigin legacy I got from the project's githut release page.

If you want it anyway, you could try searching the FreeBSD forums, they provided instructions for you to build it manually from ports, some members also kept an old package of it before it was removed. Keep in mind, FreeBSD ports is incompatible with TrueOS ports, FreeBSD packages also incompatible with TrueOS packages. GhostBSD use TrueOS ports and build their own package, they didn't use packages from FreeBSD, so it could be fail.