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
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
-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
