Session restore is definitely still there - at least with Arch on my laptop, and I don't know why it wouldn't be there with other distros (though I suppose that it could have been missing with an earlier version of KDE 5). That being said, it seems far buggier than session restore was with KDE 4. Too often, apps don't come back, or they come back on the wrong desktop. In general, I've found KDE 5 to be far buggier than KDE 4 at this stage, and I'm quite glad that my desktop is still running KDE 4. But I assume that all of those kinks will be sorted out at some point. It's already far better than it was when Arch first introduced it.

I do wish though that the KDE folks would figure out how to do major updates without breaking all kinds of stuff. I had to stop using Arch Linux completely for a while, because they introduced the KDE 5 stuff well before it was ready, and too many things were completely broken. I had assumed that with the more incremental stuff they were doing with KDE 5 (as opposed to the giant leap that was KDE 4), they would actually manage to do a major update without making a mess, but they failed. I'm still a huge KDE fan and have no interest in switching to anything else, but every machine that I can use KDE 4 on instead of KDE 5, I'm going to. Hopefully, by the time I don't have any choice, all of the major kinks in KDE 5 will have been sorted out. I fully expect that KDE 5 will eventually be where KDE 4 is, but I'm not interested in an upgrade that's a downgrade.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emac...

In Linux parlance, PC-BSD is akin to a spin of FreeBSD. A lot of the ports in the ports tree have options that you'd want enabled on a desktop system but not a server (e.g. CUPS or X support). And since FreeBSD is used on a lot of servers, the default ports configurations (and the configurations that the official, FreeBSD package repos use) have those options disabled. So, if you want to use vanilla FreeBSD as a desktop, you have to do a lot of manual configuration and building of the various ports. PC-BSD has its own package repo that's built from the ports tree just like the official FreeBSD repo, but the ports were built with the options that you'd want enabled for a desktop system. So, that's the biggest difference and why you'd definitely want to use PC-BSD for a desktop rather than vanilla FreeBSD (it saves you a lot of time and effort). Now, the PC-BSD folks have also written some additional applications to make it more desktop user-friendly (e.g. a control panel and a program for doing automatic updates), and those are installed by default on a PC-BSD system, whereas they're not installed on a vanilla FreeBSD system, and I'm not sure whether they're in the ports tree. So, it could be harder to get those on a vanilla FreeBSD system if you want them, but if they're not in the ports tree, they can definitely be gotten from the PC-BSD github repo if you really want them (though you probably wouldn't bother if you were going to go to the effort of getting vanilla FreeBSD to work nicely as a desktop).

In general though, if you're going to use FreeBSD for a desktop, you might as well just use PC-BSD, because if you use vanilla FreeBSD, you're just going to be duplicating the work that the PC-BSD guys do to make it more desktop-friendly, and you get pretty much the same thing either way (albeit branded differently).

There are plenty of programs out there that eat too much memory, and regardless, the more programs that you have running, the more memory you're system is going to be using, and the more it costs you every time that an app is using more memory than it actually needs. Browsers are particularly bad with memory for some reason, but there are plenty of other programs that eat memory for lunch. The attitude that memory is cheap is pretty toxic IMHO. Sure, it's way cheaper than it used to be, but the more apps that are written without trying to keep a reasonably low memory profile, the more memory that you need to run the same number of apps. Personally, I have lots of browser windows open all the time and plenty of other programs constantly open as well. And sometimes I have to close programs because they're too much of a memory hog, much as I might like to keep them open. Firefox is one of the worst offenders. So, I definitely care when programmers don't try and keep the memory footprint of their programs low, and _any_ program that's anywhere near a GiB in memory usage really should be looked at for how to lower its memory footprint. Firefox trivially blows past a GiB.

A router for a home network doesn't need to do much, and I very much doubt that adding entries to your DNS cache which point to 0.0.0.0 for bad domains is really going to cost much. And I'd certainly rather have that small hit to my router than have my already slow browser slowed down by more add-ons, and it avoids having to set up ad blocking on any of the devices on your network. You might even get lucky, and it'll block some malware from phoning home if something on your network gets infected with it (i.e. if it uses one of the bad domains rather than an explicit IP or some other domain to phone home), but even if that isn't terribly likely, it's at least possible when you're rerouting junk domains in your DNS server, whereas it definitely won't happen with a browser plugin. But if it really is too much for your router to have the extra entries to do ad blocking, then fine, that's not a good solution for you.

I'm definitely all for reducing firefox's memory footprint. It's definitely a memory hog. But if you use your hosts file or DNS to do your adblocking, then it works with all browsers. Heck, if you control your router, and you put the blocking in DNS there, then you get it on all of your computers. Currently, I use unbound with https://github.com/jodrell/unb... on a cronjob to update the block list regularly, and all of my browsers are free of ads without having to figure out the best way to block ads in each browser - or having to worry about how it affects firefox's already ludicrous memory footprint.

Just make it so that it can't boot - or even better so that it can't turn on at all. :)