On 2014.07.05 16:23, Brian Wood wrote: > Then I ran startxfce4. It brought up the desktop, but I can't > move the mouse and it doesn't seem to take anything from > the keyboard. I read that Gnome wasn't very stable on > FreeBSD. Getting X up and running on vanilla FreeBSD can be a pain. There's a page in the handbook that outlines how to get it going, but it needs updating. There is stuff going on right now to use newer Xorg and KMS drivers for Intel and AMD integrated GPUs. It's default on the -STABLE and -CURRENT branches, but there's a package repo with stuff built for it that you can use on -RELEASE if you want to try it: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2014-July/001570.html In any case, if you want a nice desktop system with all the ugliness worked out and where things will just work, I recommend PC-BSD. They've done a bunch of work to make a desktop environment just work. FWIW, OpenBSD might be worth looking at too since they have made desktop stuff more of a priority (and they have their own fork of X in the base system). GNOME 3 is full of linuxisms, so it's been a slow process for non-Linux systems. PC-BSD and OpenBSD have it working AFAIK. FreeBSD does a lot of things very well, but desktop bits have historically not been a huge priority.