-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
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