Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 4/1/14, 1:46 PM, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all Hey it's not an apr 1 joke if it's true.. ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 4/1/2014 1:46 AM, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? I don't know much about BSD on the desktop, but it's somewhere I'd like to go eventually. This comment caught me off, however. The fact that there are thousands of flavors of Linux vs one flavor of a BSD desktop is sort of irrelivant--it could be applied, by that same method to BSD as a server. there are hundreds of Linux distributions that can be used as a server, so by your logic, how do hundreds of Linux servers stand up to 3 flavors of BSD? I switched to BSD for a few reasons: 1) The documentation is amazing. As with any project, it can be improved as was mentioned in the most recent BSDNow, but the only other close call I can see is maybe Archlinux, and I don't want that on a server. 2) The ports and PKGNG system is beyond amazing. 3) The organization is more amazing. Everything is incredibly intuitive. I love the customization, flexability and organization of BSD. 4) I didn't care until rather recently, but anything that lets me rely less and less on GNU and the GPL is a bonus. Given this, I commend everyone who has put hundreds of hours of work into making BSD a desktop system. Rather than suggest that BSD stays merely a server OS, why not pose these issues as problems or milestones. Perhaps sound has some drawbacks, but when the day arrives when it is up to par, I can almost guarantee if the BSD ideals remain the same that it'll be so much easier and cleaner to use than pulse/alsa, etc. Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org -- Take care, Ty http://tds-solutions.net He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it’s just an elaborate April Fool’s joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool’s joke, so I’m willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I’ll choose to be serious and say what I’m about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose “the power to serve” as FreeBSD’s first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it’s easy to defend its role in the server room. It’s also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be “BSD on the desktop” (and while they share some common technologies, it’s increasingly a stretch to say that), it’s just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. 2. Multimedia. A real end-user’s desktop is basically one big UI for watching things, listening to things, and running apps. A decent audio / video subsystem is just one part of the picture, and one that has always been really weak - entire engineering teams can spend years working on codecs, performance optimizations, low and guaranteed latency support for audio I/O, etc. What’s worse, the bar is only being raised. You want to be part of the next wave of folks who can author and edit content for the new 4K video standard? Not on FreeBSD or Linux, you’re not. 3. Applications. A desktop without real and useful applications is not a desktop, it’s just an empty display surface. Sure, there are users out there who are happy with just a mail client, a web browser and maybe a calendaring app, but those users are also arguably even better candidates for Chrome or other simplified environments where all of that simply happens in a fancy web browser and you get things like “software updates” and cloud integration essentially for free since it’s all just one cohesive picture there. The ability to solve those user’s needs very simply makes them ripe targets for the web application delivery platforms. For the other folks who want to do fancier stuff like mix audio, edit videos or even just play mainstream 3D games that were actually published sometime in the last year, they’ll use a real desktop OS and won't even bother looking at one of the free ones because guess what, the free ones just can’t do those things, or do them badly enough that their users feel like they’re perpetually living in a kind of self-selected ghetto. Metaphorically speaking, sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag in your one-room apartment is fine when you’re young, but as you get older, you want to be more comfortable and have a real bed in a real house! Those are just three reasons. There are lots more, not least of which among them is the fact that it’s damn hard even just to *create* significant applications with the weak-ass APIs that *BSD and Linux provide. You have to stitch together some Frankenstein collection of libraries out of ports (or linux packages) and then hope the whole pile of multi-“vendor bits will sort of work together, which of course they rarely do because they
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi, On 04/01/14 07:46, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. Can this be translated that the green is always better on the other side ? The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. I agree that there are usability issues with the sound framework in FreeBSD. I've seen this myself, for example trying to get sound using firefox, you now need pulseaudio and it must be configured correctly. I'm pretty sure there are people around in the FreeBSD project that are quite capable and could easily fix these issues, given some coordination and funding. Probably you should ask the FreeBSD foundation to fund a developer for a year or two to work on the desktop issues. Desktop is complicated. You need to understand that many device frameworks are designed entirely for other platforms, and I think that the current approach to compile Linux oriented code like HAL under FreeBSD is not always the right approach. We need to make our own HAL that is compatible with the Linux Applications, that need to know where the scanner or webcam is attached. Speaking about sound again, I think we need a tiny library and daemon that sits between /dev/dspX.X and the applications, that pulls together the most common audio libraries, like portaudio, pulseaudio and the KDE one, into a single and brand new solution. I did propose something at EuroBSDcon last year, that we can use character device emulation in user-space, cuse4bsd, to achieve this. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Did FreeBSD ever compete on the Desktop market? While touching this topic, I must say that I'm very grateful to all you port-guys that keep stuff compiling and working on the Desktop front. I've asked myself a few times during the last couple of years, who are the people really making my FreeBSD Desktop work? Did they receive enough thanks or funds for their work? Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Because something does not work in FreeBSD it can prove an excellent opportunity for someone to fix it! Don't underestimate that! --HPS ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 1 Apr 2014, at 08:11, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. Just a small note here: Improving power management is something that the Core Team and the Foundation have jointly identified as an important goal, in particular for mobile / embedded scenarios. We're currently coordinating potential sponsors for the work and soliciting proposals from people interested in doing the work. If you know of anyone in either category then please drop either me, core, or the Foundation an email. Some things have already seen progress, for example Davide's calloutng work includes timer coalescing, but there are still a lot of, uh, opportunities for improvement. The Symbian EKA2 book has some very interesting detail on their power management infrastructure, which would be worth looking at for anyone interested in working on this, and I believe your former employer had some expertise in this area. Of course, no matter how good the base system becomes at power management, we still can't prevent stuff in ports running idle spinloops. We can, however, provide tools that encourage power-efficient design. For example, currently hald wakes up every 30 seconds and polls the optical drive if you have one. Why? Because there's no devd event when a CD is inserted, so the only way for it to get these notifications is polling. If you have a laptop with an optical drive, this is really bad for power usage. David ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 12:11:19PM +0500, Jordan Hubbard wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it’s just an elaborate April Fool’s joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool’s joke, so I’m willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I’ll choose to be serious and say what I’m about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose “the power to serve” as FreeBSD’s first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it’s easy to defend its role in the server room. It’s also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be “BSD on the desktop” (and while they share some common technologies, it’s increasingly a stretch to say that), it’s just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. 2. Multimedia. A real end-user’s desktop is basically one big UI for watching things, listening to things, and running apps. A decent audio / video subsystem is just one part of the picture, and one that has always been really weak - entire engineering teams can spend years working on codecs, performance optimizations, low and guaranteed latency support for audio I/O, etc. What’s worse, the bar is only being raised. You want to be part of the next wave of folks who can author and edit content for the new 4K video standard? Not on FreeBSD or Linux, you’re not. 3. Applications. A desktop without real and useful applications is not a desktop, it’s just an empty display surface. Sure, there are users out there who are happy with just a mail client, a web browser and maybe a calendaring app, but those users are also arguably even better candidates for Chrome or other simplified environments where all of that simply happens in a fancy web browser and you get things like “software updates” and cloud integration essentially for free since it’s all just one cohesive picture there. The ability to solve those user’s needs very simply makes them ripe targets for the web application delivery platforms. For the other folks who want to do fancier stuff like mix audio, edit videos or even just play mainstream 3D games that were actually published sometime in the last year, they’ll use a real desktop OS and won't even bother looking at one of the free ones because guess what, the free ones just can’t do those things, or do them badly enough that their users feel like they’re perpetually living in a kind of self-selected ghetto. Metaphorically speaking, sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag in your one-room apartment is fine when you’re young, but as you get older, you want to be more comfortable and have a real bed in a real house! Those are just three reasons. There are lots more, not least of which among them is the fact that it’s damn hard even just to *create* significant applications with the weak-ass APIs that *BSD and Linux provide. You have to stitch together some Frankenstein collection of libraries out of ports (or linux packages) and then hope the whole
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 22:46 -0700, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Why even bother? Its over, just embrace the future and be like this happy Mac user: http://people.freebsd.org/~sbruno/happy_desktop_user.jpg sean ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. Ha, ha, ha. Reminds me of the long running 04-01 gag stating that kernel.org ran on FreeBSD. As to Leaving the Desktop Market; +1. OK by me. OTOH The following /will/ give you everything you /claim/ isn't /currently/ possible. x11/xorg-minimal x11-wm/xfce4 audio/aquqlung multimedia/vlc The above list also gives you the ability to switch output(s) on the fly (via mixer). exotic video card? emulators/linux_base-f10 x11/nvidia-driver --Chris P.S. Happy April fools to you, too. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: Eitan Adler [mailto:li...@eitanadler.com] Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 10:47 PM To: hack...@freebsd.org; curr...@freebsd.org; freebsd- advoc...@freebsd.org Subject: Leaving the Desktop Market Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan, While I understand your frustration, VICOR is using FreeBSD as a Desktop since FreeBSD 2.2. We don't use sound and we are fine relying on vesa. While I understand that the things you listed are actual short-comings for normal Desktop users, I think it's the wrong decision to say that we should be backing out *any* functionality that would make the Desktop any more difficult to produce. As it stands, it would take me weeks just to count the number of workstations that are running a GUI, rely on one of the existing video drivers (nv, radeon, mach64, etc.) and use lots of Desktop ports. -- Devin _ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message and all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any manner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and review by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you. ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Mon, March 31, 2014 10:46 pm, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: itâs almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely itâs that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-curr...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Hi, I don't understand the gripe about sound. OSS works well. If you install the verson in ports, audio/oss, you get a more elaborate set of tools. (you can use the tools with the OSS drivers in base, its possible to remove the base OSS system and *only* use the updated OSS system however there are some caveats that may cause serious issues with a 'user', if you don't want to get your hands dirty don't mess with that.) Anyhow, last I went through a few month period of experimenting with sound and picked up a bunch of hardware on ebay, different cards from various vendors, ie asus, creative, etc. Its possible and not too difficult to have four or five cards on the machine and use them simultaneously. I didn't notice any problem switching from speakers to headphones while music is playing. Maybe this works on other operating systems, i haven't tried. The thing about sound, the card is a digital-to-analog converter, and vice-versa. It uses PCM data. (PCM was actually first 'invented' in the 1800's - no fools joke). Digital audio/Sound has never really gotten better, it has only gotten cheaper. -- Waitman Gobble San Jose California USA +1.510-830-7975 ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: Lars Engels [mailto:lars.eng...@0x20.net] Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 2:41 AM To: Jordan Hubbard Cc: Eitan Adler; hack...@freebsd.org; curr...@freebsd.org; freebsd- advoc...@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 12:11:19PM +0500, Jordan Hubbard wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? -- Devin _ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message and all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any manner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and review by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you. ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 6:57 AM, Sean Bruno sean...@yahoo-inc.com wrote: Why even bother? Its over, just embrace the future and be like this happy Mac user: http://people.freebsd.org/~sbruno/happy_desktop_user.jpg I have Macs at work (typing on one now), and a mac at home. I like them. I recently installed FreeBSD 10 on an Intel i5 NUC. 16GB ram, and a 120GB m-SATA SSD. I put a nice keyboard and an old 19” Dell monitor on it, used vidconsole to make the screen green on black, and a decent resolution. It’s just like being back in the 80s, when Unix had a desktop market, only much, much faster. ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Mon, March 31, 2014 10:46 pm, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: itâ�s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely itâ�s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-curr...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Hi, I don't understand the gripe about sound. OSS works well. If you install the verson in ports, audio/oss, you get a more elaborate set of tools. ---8--- The thing about sound, the card is a digital-to-analog converter, and vice-versa. It uses PCM data. (PCM was actually first 'invented' in the 1800's - no fools joke). Digital audio/Sound has never really gotten better, it has only gotten cheaper. WOW. That an interesting bit of historical information. Thanks for sharing it! --Chris -- Waitman Gobble San Jose California USA +1.510-830-7975 ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Cheers, -matt ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 07:52:13AM -0700, dte...@freebsd.org wrote: -Original Message- From: Lars Engels [mailto:lars.eng...@0x20.net] Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 2:41 AM To: Jordan Hubbard Cc: Eitan Adler; hack...@freebsd.org; curr...@freebsd.org; freebsd- advoc...@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 12:11:19PM +0500, Jordan Hubbard wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? No, mutt, with vim as mail composer. :) pgpa2HLJBs_1H.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Seeing this I could not resist: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/which-operating-system Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Let them prosper! Seriously, though. There are shortcomings, sure. But I tend to prefer the rock solid feature rich base with a somewhat shaky desktop experience than the other alternatives. Sure I would like to see a FreeBSD pulseaudio compatible sound server. And perhaps a template library for pinout configs for snd-cards. And native flash, although I say flash, no thank you Perhaps companies such as Netflix could release FreeBSD clients ahead of linux clients ;) I can also say that I recently got a friend to migrate from linux on both his home server as well as his laptop. He is very happy with the change. Cheers Andreas Cheers, -matt ___ freebsd-curr...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi all, I have been a member of the FreeBSD hackers mailing list for about a year.5 now and I must say that I was looking forward to this year's 4/1 email. Last year, I didn't even realize that the discussion of promoting i386 as a tier 1 architecture was a joke until someone blatantly mentioned in... To address the actual content of this thread, personally, I absolutely love the FreeBSD os and the community that supports it. However, even as a third year computer engineering student, I still have not overcome the overhead that comes with becoming familiar with the UNIX environment. Of course, that is mostly attributed to my laziness and my unwillingness to sit through an entire reading of documentation... To share an observation, I am a teaching assistant for a freshman C programming class and I recently set up three FreeBSD servers, one for each section, where students could learn to develop C programs in an actual UNIX environment. Here is the lecture that I wrote up to help them learn the basics: http://vecr.ece.villanova.edu/bk/fc/labs/docs/ece1620-l2unix.pdf. I led the first section yesterday and I have to say that it was an utter disaster. Only about 1/8th of the class showed even an ounce of interest in this stuff (as it was something extra and not required for the course) and I really f'ed up by trying to teach them how to use vi... Long live the BSD community! On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Andreas Nilsson andrn...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Seeing this I could not resist: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/which-operating-system Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Let them prosper! Seriously, though. There are shortcomings, sure. But I tend to prefer the rock solid feature rich base with a somewhat shaky desktop experience than the other alternatives. Sure I would like to see a FreeBSD pulseaudio compatible sound server. And perhaps a template library for pinout configs for snd-cards. And native flash, although I say flash, no thank you Perhaps companies such as Netflix could release FreeBSD clients ahead of linux clients ;) I can also say that I recently got a friend to migrate from linux on both his home server as
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: owner-freebsd-advoc...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-advoc...@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Randi Harper You know you opened a can of worms with that one. Because all the nerds are going to step up and say Well, I run FreeBSD on my desktop! It's totally viable! Dear nerds, get some perspective. You aren't an end user, and you're masochistic. It's okay, we accept you here. But your individual use case doesn't indicate a place in the market. Your basement isn't a market. It's a basement. Your small company isn't a market. It's a small company. Many companies combined create a market. Why aren't all the nerds and small businesses out there a market? I'm no marketing expert or anything, but it would seem that there is some kind of market out there that isn't being catered to. I may be a masochist, but I refuse to have to pay Apples prices for their hardware. They just seem insane to me. If they ever decided to sell OS X for non-Apple hardware I might use it. OK. Now that I opened my big fat mouth, and made the mistake of involving myself earlier in this post before finishing my first of coffee. I'm already committed, so here goes... Can we take a look at advocacy for a moment? What defines it exactly? Is there better advocacy than another? What's the best advocacy? Is it contributing more $$ to the foundation? Is it contributing lines of code to the project? Is it putting a textual, or graphical link the Power to Serve on your web page? Is it telling everyone you know about how great FreeBSD is? I don't know. But just the other day, as I struggled with the [apparent] direction(s) FreeBSD was taking in the past few months. I began to reflect on the ~25yrs. of working with the code, and then (*)BSD itself. I realized that I spent no less than 75% of my waking hours in front of the tty. Almost all of which, was in some way related to FreeBSD. Much of it, was dedicated to installs. I calculate to this day, I have performed some 36,000 installs. At least 28,000 still running. Then it occurred to me; if that isn't the BEST form of advocacy, I don't know what is. Really. Think about it. So say what you will. Condemn, or patronize the misfits of society, the geeks, or geeky people. But know this; if it weren't for them, FreeBSD wouldn't be but some pie-in-the-sky ideal/dream. In some far away thought, or dream. For the record; I /don't/ live in my basement. I /do/ take showers. I own my home outright (2nd one, for the record). What's more, my current one was a complete renovation, which I performed myself. Masochistic? Maybe, but somebody has to pay the price, so others can reap the luxury. No? --Chris out... And just for the record I've been using FreeBSD as an exclusive home desktop since 1999. At work now so however Outlook mangles this is my fault :) Rod Person Programmer (412)454-2616 Just because it can been done, does not mean it should be done. ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Tuesday, April 01, 2014 a las 07:43:02PM +0200, Lars Engels escribió: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? No, mutt, with vim as mail composer. :) +1 matthias (FreeBSD since 2.2.5 and sending this from an EeePC 900, netbook, UMTS connected, KDE4 desktop, sound, webcam, vim, mutt, sendmail, ...) -- Sent from my FreeBSD netbook Matthias Apitz, g...@unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ f: +49-170-4527211 UNIX since V7 on PDP-11, UNIX on mainframe since ESER 1055 (IBM /370) UNIX on x86 since SVR4.2 UnixWare 2.1.2, FreeBSD since 2.2.5 ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 04/01/2014 07:46, dte...@freebsd.org wrote: Eitan, While I understand your frustration, VICOR is using FreeBSD as a Desktop since FreeBSD 2.2. We don't use sound and we are fine relying on vesa. While I understand that the things you listed are actual short-comings for normal Desktop users, I think it's the wrong decision to say that we should be backing out *any* functionality that would make the Desktop any more difficult to produce. As it stands, it would take me weeks just to count the number of workstations that are running a GUI, rely on one of the existing video drivers (nv, radeon, mach64, etc.) and use lots of Desktop ports. I have three FreeBSD desktops (one at work, one at home-office, and one for the usual messing around). They're all running 9.2, with Windows for Unix(TM)...uh, I mean KDE v4.12.3 as the GUI. Yes, I actually like KDE. I also have a machine at home running Debian Wheezy, also with KDE, and I have 2-3 mac devices that actually run MacOS (I have a few mac minis that run Free- and OpenBSD). The minis work exceptionally well as FreeBSD workstations. Each of the FreeBSD systems I have is my go-to workstation--it's where I do most of my work. Only if I can't do something (or don't want to run it on FreeBSD--e.g. Flash), do I use the Mac. The Debian box I just use for messing around--nothing serious. My home FreeBSD workstation has perfect sound, excellent graphics (nvidia), and I can even watch a lot of video using Firefox, since video is increasingly becoming HTML5-based. For me it just works. The whole combination that makes up my environment can be challenging to keep up-to-date, but it's getting a lot easier with pkgng and portmaster. I would hate to see this stuff, which I find very useful, and helps me both at work and home, to be ripped out of the OS. I have been using FreeBSD on the desktop since 1997, when I had two workstations on my desk (FreeBSD and RedHat) and I let them duke it out to see who would win. FreeBSD won then, and even though I continue to keep a Linux desktop around for fun, FreeBSD still wins on the basis of usability, stability, security, etc. michael PS. My current KDE wallpaper for my work office machine is the Windows XP green hillside with blue sky background. It's giving people fits here. ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-advocacy-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
