Xfce Oh no! Something went wrong

[kjpetrie]

This very helpful message accompanied by a picture of a frowning monitor is what I get if I try to start GDM or after logging in with lightdm. I have tried with both Plasma and XFCE sessions. I think I've followed the instructions for installing Xorg and the desktops but I am forced to use the SCFB driver since my nvidia card is now too old for the proprietary drivers. There are no errors in
/var/logXorg.0.log. I hope this message, generated after X has started but on trying to launch programs within it, is sufficiently distinctive to indicate what is likely to be missing. If not it's going to be difficult to post details of files since I can't get a browser going on that machine in FreeBSD.

 

[bsduck]

Unfortunately, this is the default and quite useless error message from GNOME, so it's hard to tell what's going on from that.

I am forced to use the SCFB driver since my nvidia card is now too old for the proprietary drivers.

If I were you I would consider running NetBSD on this machine. It has the nouveau driver, which is very welcome when you have old GPUs which don't get nvidia drivers anymore.

 

[kjpetrie]

Thanks, I had just come to the conclusion I won't get a good desktop experience on this machine with FreeBSD. I normally use Linux for desktops and FreeBSD for servers, but wanted to try something else because one application, zoom, has started crashing my current Linux system and as that's such an essential program for life these days I'm trying to find something it'll be stable on. NetBSD sounds like an excellent answer to try if it has nouveau.

 

[cracauer@]

Thanks, I had just come to the conclusion I won't get a good desktop experience on this machine with FreeBSD. I normally use Linux for desktops and FreeBSD for servers, but wanted to try something else because one application, zoom, has started crashing my current Linux system and as that's such an essential program for life these days I'm trying to find something it'll be stable on. NetBSD sounds like an excellent answer to try if it has nouveau.

But you can do Zoom in a browser window.