Is there a real interest in pushing FreeBSD on the desktop space?

Did you watch the conference? The whole point they've discussed was to provide an environment where people can either develop FreeBSD, or port their code to it. It doesn't stop you from doing a vanilla installation and installing your desired desktop manually. They hinted at KDE; which I think would be a good choice. Plasma is bloated as hell, but KDE has very solid APIs to develop software with. Both KDE and FreeBSD conform to ABI/API stability. I'm willing to bet it'll attract more users/developer to FreeBSD; just because of the less barrier to entry alone. I've been saying this for a while now. Very interesting talk they had.
 
freezr said:
Project like Debian are entirely built up by volunteers ...
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Two corrections. First, Debian is mostly a distribution, not a software development: It for the most part doesn't develop software, it mostly packages and distributes existing software. That distinguishes it from for example RedHat, which has done (and funded) a lot of development of software from scratch. Now, the work of assembling / integrating / testing / distributing a complete OS distribution is still significant, but also much smaller.

Second, a significant fraction of the "volunteers" who contribute to Debian do that as part of their day job. They get paid by their employers do develop and contribute things to Debian that their employers need. They are not paid by "Debian Inc.", there is no such entity with a huge budget (unlike for example RedHat, which had a billion $ budget). For example, note that Debian is the favorite Linux distribution used by the hyperscalers, both in-house, and as a cloud offering. They do a lot of software engineering, and feed the results back upstream.

(About not using apps on a desktop)
bsduck said:
I'll disagree with this. Sure, you hardly need more than a browser nowadays to receive/consume all kinds of content and interact with other people. But as soon as you want to produce something that isn't just text (or a web page), you'll do that in a dedicated application. Serious office work is not done in a web browser. Same with anything related to multimedia, be it graphic design, photo or video editing, music production, etc. Then come science/research, and all kinds of job-specific tasks that have their own dedicated software. These are definitely common use cases of desktop computers, which are all done in local applications.
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Office work (documents, spreadsheets, presentations) can be done in a web browser, in either Google Docs or Office 365. Database queries and management can be done in web browsers. Graphing and data science can be done in web browsers (look at Jupyter). For software development, I still mostly use ssh access and a GUI, but there are also very good coding environments in web browsers. Project tracking, bug management, source control can all be done in web browsers (or from the command line).

I admit that for high-bandwidth tasks (such as photo and video editing) the web browser might not be there yet, but give it a few years and that will change. In a nutshell: If you look at X, Wayland and Quartz as a form of rendering engine and compositor, you can replace them with Chrome and JS: architecturally, it doesn't really matter what programming language and network protocol you use to put pixels on the screen. As an example, remember the NeXT, which used Display Postscript over a network stack, and that worked just fine too. There is no fundamental limitation that says that we can't just use the web browser as the pixel generating machine.

zirias@ said:
... creating print-quality documents (latex rules!),
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I use LaTeX without needing local access. I edit the source code on my server, run latex and dvips there, and then view the resulting files as pdf in a web browser.

typesetting sheet music,
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And this is where native apps are still required: Niche tasks that haven't been ported to the web yet. I use MuseScore occasionally, and Finale and Sibelius rarely, and yes, for those I need to get the old Windows machine booted. Similar with CAD (which I fortunately don't have to do), and GIS. I don't think there is a fundamental limitation that prevents any of these applications from switching to the web (for example, Microsoft Visio is accessible over the web), but they are small enough, they haven't made the jump yet. So there is still older apps that have to run natively, but that set is shrinking rapidly.
 
I really do not understand this recurring theme "desktop".

I use FreeBSD as Desktop, I always used as Desktop a BSD version. If you do not want it, use as desktop
what you like, linux, windows, mac.

Does Desktop mean gaming? Then perhaps a game console is what you need. Then go playing and leave us
in peace.
 
freezr said:
Hi there,

this is something that I have never dared to ask... But I couldn't resist anymore...

Is there a real interest in pushing FreeBSD on the desktop space?
I have the impression the answer is: not really!

And perhaps the project is hoping that someone else would bring this chance seriously, and we saw and there are a bunch of OSs built on top of FreeBSD but too small to have any gravitational attraction.

I saw that in the Linux realm the desktop has been the leverage and force to gain traction over the market and to get attention by the hardware manufacturers, for example Ubuntu built a small empire just because made Debian easy to install.

What I am trying to say is that Desktop space is not just a playground for nerds and geeks, it has the benefits to populate internet searches and to leverage a common and positive shared vision, so eventually for Linux this constant exposure let hardware manufacturers start considering it as platform to dedicate at least a bloated driver.

I wonder why the FreeBSD Foundation is voluntary avoiding the opportunity to improve the own perception and to get better hardware support directly from the manufacturers for instance.

Perhaps this decision was made years ago and I missed it because I arrived late…

Long story short a dedicated Spin-off Desktop version can be considered a showcase and an easy approach to show the benefits of using FreeBSD on the server side, but this must a project with same effort the foundation put on the current FreeBSD.

Anyway, just curiosity... 🙏
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Not as a product, but as part of.
 
Actually the YT-video-link to the BSDCan2023Sumit is the most valuable contribution in this thread. Starting there it makes clear for everyone what purpose the "Desktop" has for FreeBSD:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-6cPMaMek&t=4419s


The purpose of a desktop is to serve developers' needs working on FreeBSD projects.

If you want to "abuse" this purpose, ok fine go ahead, but do not expect anything beyond.
 
I have an interest in pushing FreeBSD on the desktop/laptop and other related devices. It's a really great system.

But it is great as it is. It's not great because it works like Mac or Windows or Ubuntu (what most people mean when they say Linux).
 
jardows said:
Why is there no real interest in pushing FreeBSD on servers? There is no out of the box official "server" version of FreeBSD - you have to configure from the base install manually to get the server you need.
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I guess you're pointing out that FreeBSD is lean by default, and you've got to enable stuff by your own. Well, for large scale deployment that's not such a big thing IMHO, because people would use stuff like Ansible anyway.

What could more of a blocker for some people putting FreeBSD on a server is the lack of Docker; then again for some this might be an advantage.
 
freezr said:
I respectfully disagree, there is full immersion in the server space, in fact:

The power to serve
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Your assumption is wrong, "the power to serve" is to be translated to "the power to serve the user - whatever she or he wants to do with the operating system". I'd love to see more FreeBSD (desktop) users, and refugees from Linux - especially Linux users who recognize that there is a great alternative out there.

However, I do not see major progress in increasing "market share", which is fine for me as long as my requirements are met: first, as mentioned before, the desktop is dead. Also, FreeBSD is far behind what most users consider modern: we still lack proper USB support, we lack wifi/bluetooth support, automatic printer installation ... you see where this is going? FreeBSD does not things most users (Windows, Mac, Linux) see as granted, like automatic install with Gui, automatic install of a printer, usb devices etc. FreeBSD is a niche, it does not want to become a solution that is already out there. An incredible amount of work would be necessary to achieve the goal of being a real competitor to Windows, Mac, Linux to those (I guess) 97% non-technical users who give a shit what is running their GUI as long as they do not have to spend time in setting it up.

As long as FreeBSD is updated regularly, I have my encrypted personal data on ZFS, my jails work, my browser works, my photo editing software works, my hypervisor works for occasionally using some dev tools on Windows, it plays music, I have an updated version of libreoffice and most importantly I am able to do my work I will be a happy FreeBSD user as I have been the last 20 years.
 
freezr said:
I respectfully disagree, there is full immersion in the server space, in fact:



However FreeBSD is shaped to be quite agnostic even though, ZFS default settings, which is the most exposed feature, are design to handle a wide varieties of tasks.
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You missed my point. The complaint in these threads always come down to “I want FreeBSD to be pre-configured with a graphical environment out of the box just like Linux does.” Since FreeBSD does not, the OP claims that there is no interest in FreeBSD as a GUI workstation/gaming machine and the project only cares about servers. My point is that by the criteria of the complaint, you can make equal charge that FreeBSD doesn’t care about servers or network appliances since there is no out of box configuration for those. The complaint made here and on myriads of similar threads is misdirected and show lack of any understanding of what FreeBSD is.
 
Looks like the beer-generation is arriving at FreeBSD demandig pushing, pitching and the like for their convenience.

FreeBSD has "Free" in it's name because you are free to configure what you want. But you have to do it on your own.

Developers just need a terminal, an editor and unfortunately in our times an Internet-browser. Only for being able to use browsers we have gotten X and later even Wayland.

FreeBSD is not a feel well oasis for the masses. Either learn to setup your stuff or just stay away.
 
TL;DR - you (a potential FreeBSD user) are free to do the work (install and configure FreeBSD) yourself. You are also free to complain that FreeBSD should make this easier for you. And the rest of the world (including existing FreeBSD users) are free to ignore your complaints.
 
jardows said:
The complaint made here and on myriads of similar threads is misdirected and show lack of any understanding of what FreeBSD is.
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And what UNIX is. Every Linux distribution with different appearance is called "an operating system", there are lot
of computer amateurs making "new operating systems" (Linux distributions). Perhaps the real different
"operating systems" are KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. Well, perhaps unix is a console to give some commands
like ls, pwd, ps, and as GUI X11 with twm. In any case, to have such a standard is very practical for a user,
one knows more or less what to do when one is in front of a new computer with really a different OS, and
FreeBSD conforms that standard.
 
jardows said:
My point is that by the criteria of the complaint, you can make equal charge that FreeBSD doesn’t care about servers or network appliances since there is no out of box configuration for those.
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FreeBSD is intrinsically a server operating system. So it's designed for servers out of the box. Strawman arguments don't help here.

LibreQuest said:
The handbook makes it super easy. And after setting up about four systems I rarely need to consult the handbook.
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If you're trying to introduce FreeBSD to a group of developers (third party drivers or applications), and those developers wanted something easily accessible to get their code running; having them read the handbook and do post mortem configuration to get a desktop running is a waste of time and resources. This is one of many reasons why they flock to macOS or Windows; there's way less friction. Even for the novice user who's never programmed in their life. Once they see that wall of text flow on their screen; they're not going to know what to do.

Slapping a GUI on the base system to make systems research and development on FreeBSD easier? There's nothing to lose there. You guys need to watch that section of the dev summit.

Besides, the handbook was merely a guide for systems administrators. Putting desktop shit in there is pointless IMO.
 
Another way to look at it is FreeBSD is a custom operating system. Unlike Ubuntu and the like, you aren't stuck with what's given to you. We (FreeBSD) will custom design almost any desktop system to your liking and you can later configure it yourself! Just the way you like it!! Imagine having a system built just for you!!!

Can you imagine how much FreeBSD could charge for such a thing?
 
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