It really depends on your use case. Most of my simple chat messages are the same as I would have in any public space. I have no need for encryption, I have need for convenience in that regard. With Telegram I have my chat history on all devices and don't need to use my phone to connect which are two must-haves for me. For my use case, Signal is the worse option. That doesn't make Signal bad, just not suitable for me.

As a privacy-concious person I am very much aware of the non-secure nature of my chats, but since that is not a factor of consideration to me when it comes to casual chats with a few friends and family members. The worst thing Telegram could do is analyse my chats and ... then what?

Thank you :-) If you refer to my wallpaper switcher, the images are from pixiv and yandere. I have the (downscaled where applicable) images and links to the originals in the git repo.

When I talk about the crappy laptop, it's the fact that it will lock up at random when under medium or high load (which can be as much as watching a youtube video). Spec-wise it is plenty for my use and yours is definitely worse ;-)

The light theme sure does look pretty but it'd hurt my over-sensitive eyes after a few minutes. I will however for sure check out the darker version you showed in a different reply. My main pc's desktop is ugly right now because I just use it to get stuff done, but I wanted to change that for some time and I'll give this theme a test drive :-)

Not a lock screen per se. I did not like the idea of having logout/reboot/shutdown buttons in the status bar since I don't want to click them by mistake, so I made a key combo (Meta+Del) which shows this custom screen with the mentioned options in the bottom right. As for the image, it is a darkened version of this one.

Not being able to print unused workspaces is just a weird thing for me as well, but I'm also someone who would be called "old" by certain age groups. I have never used i3 so I wouldn't know how to achieve that there..

Not at all, I still had to store the stuff in git anyway. Here you go: https://github.com/lindely/laptop

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In a work context only for video meetings. When working remote I use my Linux desktop which lacks a webcam and microphone. Also, we use the Cisco ICAClient to work remote and I doubt that would work on a BSD system anyway.

For the few tasks I use this system it works about as well as when I had Linux on it. I mostly use the browser and terminal anyway, so those are pretty basic requirements. Video conferencing for my job is via WebEx, which has no working app for BSD so I have to use Chomium for that (their H264 plugin won't work on Firefox in BSD). Launching their website in Chromium vs using their electron app on linux makes no big difference to me in the end of the day, though. Camera and microphone work fine.

Depending on your personal needs, however, BSD may not fulfill all of them. I think that if you want a state of the art desktop experience, BSD is not the way to go. Software can be a bit behind compared to Linux. Plasma 6, for example, is not ready for daily use yet. Xorg still is the stable way to go, I feel. Also, electron applications are not available in the package repository, so if you want to use those you will have to build them yourself. There usually are ports available though, so you can easily build them, but it will take a while. Other software will simply not build. The official Hyprland plugins for example rely on a build flag that is not available in the compiler BSD uses (if I read that correcly), so no additional plugins for this guy.

If you could summarise your system usage to, for example, using a full KDE Plasma 5 desktop, browser, office suite and playing some multimedia, there is no reason a BSD desktop could not work for you. It does become noticable how many electron-based applications are popularised nowadays, though, so you may need to look into alternatives for some applications you use. I chose Hyprland because I hate touchpads (or this touchpad specifically) and wanted to use it as little as possible.. :-) I tested KDE though, and it worked perfectly.

If you want to try out FreeBSD as a desktop system and you have an adequately sized USB stick (f.e. 8GB or more), I would recommend trying out NomadBSD. It can be installed on a USB stick and you can use it as a full fledged OS; all packages are installed on the USB stick. It's not fast, because USB, but that's how I checked if all the hardware in this crappy laptop (it really is crappy and unstable, on all OS'es) worked with BSD.

At the end of the day I have a soft spot for BSD so I tend to ignore some of the downsides that come with when not used as a server. My main desktop and the PC connected to my television both run Linux, for example. BSD I use on my server, router and now this laptop.

The original is on pixiv but you can also find it on yande.re. On the screenshot it has a transparent layer of black covering it to make it darker.

Now that's awfully cool of you 😄. I'll give that a spin with Symfonium this weekend; much obliged!

This sounds like a cool thing. Will it run on FreeBSD? If unknown, I will likely try and find out this weekend.