Are FreeBSD developers ever going to start focusing on user facing stuff?

T

thorbsd

I loved using FreeBSD on my desktop, but it's unusable on my Dell XPS 15z laptop. I switched over to Linux, and everything works just fine.

I've posted to the driver mailing list twice with no response about getting the touchpad to work, I've got no idea if anyone is working on porting Bumblebee over (or working on code that works with the official nVidia drivers) so the Optimus nVidia card can be disabled, the LCD panel brightness buttons don't work, the DVD eject button doesn't work, and there is still no VT switching.

The touchpad is used in almost all the Dell XPS laptops, so surely there's a large number of people that would benefit from someone looking at fixing this problem.

No VT switching literally affects everyone. How could this still be disabled after more than a year? Is anyone even working on this?

Should I just accept that nobody working on FreeBSD has any desire to fix the problems laptop users face?
 
Work is being done on updating the system console. NVidia chooses to not provide programming information, which kind of makes the responsibility for support theirs. What do they say about it?
 
fonz said:
Feel free to get your own hands dirty...
Click to expand...

Nobody would (or should) accept any code I could contribute.

wblock@ said:
Work is being done on updating the system console. NVidia chooses to not provide programming information, which kind of makes the responsibility for support theirs. What do they say about it?
Click to expand...

Optimus is supported in the official nVidia driver AFAIK, and now what's left is OS support for dynamically turning the card on and off.
 
I have been a loyal FreeBSD user for well over a decade. Over the years, I've seen it go from a wealth of development on all kinds of things, to either stupid political arguments over GPL code, blatant denial of any work done towards a number of newer devices and options that should have been in the kernel years ago: ext4 read-write, XFS that doesn't suck, and an XFS read-write, btrfs, touchpads, write ALSA to talk to FreeBSD, praise God for Pulseaudio, at least that offers some level of consistency. Well all this is GPL. And thus deemed unworthy of FreeBSD attention. It seems that when someone asks, the answer is always:
  • "Do it yourself."
  • "Get your hands dirty."
  • "Oh, so and so got started on it back in 2007, read this useless thread."
Sadly, this is putting the death nails into what was once THE vibrant OS. The only reason FreeBSD hasn't gone the way of the dodo yet, is because of PF and ZFS. Both I use, both are built like a brick shithouse. I wish more time was spent making native FreeBSD support for read-write capabilities for all the modern filesystems, graphics drivers, etc.

Mad? Bitter? No, I am in deep sadness seeing all the BSDs getting left behind, for what I see, as internal political bull. I LOVE FreeBSD, but advocating it is near impossible anymore, just the same 'Secure, Stable and Easy to Maintain and an unbeatable network stack' only goes so far, when asked about the brand new 11n card, or btrfs kernel support. <$/22.22>
 
I've got half a mind to close this thread because we've already had this discussion several times before.

In a nutshell:
  • There are way more people who want stuff than people who can actually make it happen. Most people lack the skills, the time, the motivation or any combination thereof.
  • Only a few people get paid to work on specific things. Most of the time, whenever anyone makes a suggestion (or states a demand, or anything in between) but they can't (and/or don't want to) do it themselves, someone else is going to have to step up and say: "Ok, that sounds like a good idea, I think I can do this and I volunteer to spend my time on it."
  • It appears that people often forget this: there are not a whole lot of developers on this forum. If you want something done, you'll usually have a better chance asking on an appropriate mailing list. With only a few notable exceptions, that's where the developers hang out, not here. This is a user community, not a consultation office for developers or the FreeBSD Foundation.
  • When presenting your suggestions to the developers, keep in mind that most of them are volunteers. Talking with a sense of entitlement tends to rub them the wrong way.
 
It's an old problem. There are people who want things who are not able to create them themselves. The solution has always been to either motivate others to create them, or learn to create them yourself. The first is quicker, but might take money.
 
The "developers" that you're referring to are mostly enthusiasts and IT professionals that have a $JOB to take care of first before they can put any effort into making FreeBSD better. They are in fact people just like you and me and the preferred way to improve things is to contribute yourself, either by providing feedback/bug reports or by contributing code/patches.

You really have to stop thinking that there's some central committee that approves/rejects everything that is proposed as an improvement to FreeBSD.
 
thorbsd said:
The touchpad is used in almost all the Dell XPS laptops, so surely there's a large number of people that would benefit from someone looking at fixing this problem.
Click to expand...
As far as I've been able to find out those models use a Synaptics touchpad. Have you tried x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics?
 
I'm not getting into this discussion in-depth because my opinion differs too heavily from yours (would be a fruitless discussion).

But:

jnbek said:
The only reason FreeBSD hasn't gone the way of the dodo yet, is because of PF and ZFS. Both I use, both are built like a brick shithouse.
Click to expand...
Focussing on ZFS here.

I can't comment on the way it was built; the original port from Sun Solaris to FreeBSD was obviously done by FreeBSD developers, but rumour also has it that several Sun Solaris developers spent company resources on it. I tried to search the Net but couldn't really find anything to back all this up, but I think it does give a good impression. This PDF paper is also a good read. This wasn't something which people "just did".

Now, coming to my point. You should also keep in mind that these projects are constantly being worked on, it's not a static feature set which gets presented and then never heard from again.

If you read that original announcement you'll see that ZFS originally didn't work on AMD64, you couldn't boot from it, it didn't support ACL's and using iSCSI targets was also a no no.

I'm currently using an AMD64 based VPS running FreeBSD and it only uses ZFS. On top of that it also has no issues with ACL's any longer.

Which I think is something to keep in mind as well. And working on a file system is most certainly not an easy feat.
 
SirDice said:
As far as I've been able to find out those models use a Synaptics touchpad. Have you tried x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics?
Click to expand...

Most of what I've seen from the last two generations of XPS is that they used a Cypress touchpad, which I know because I kept checking all the models for more up to date versions of compatible Windows drivers. Perhaps the older models and the current generation have gone back to Synaptic touchpads.

fonz said:
I've got half a mind to close this thread because we've already had this discussion several times before.

In a nutshell:
  • There are way more people who want stuff than people who can actually make it happen. Most people lack the skills, the time, the motivation or any combination thereof.
  • Only a few people get paid to work on specific things. Most of the time, whenever anyone makes a suggestion (or states a demand, or anything in between) but they can't (and/or don't want to) do it themselves, someone else is going to have to step up and say: "Ok, that sounds like a good idea, I think I can do this and I volunteer to spend my time on it."
  • It appears that people often forget this: there are not a whole lot of developers on this forum. If you want something done, you'll usually have a better chance asking on an appropriate mailing list. With only a few notable exceptions, that's where the developers hang out, not here. This is a user community, not a consultation office for developers or the FreeBSD Foundation.
  • When presenting your suggestions to the developers, keep in mind that most of them are volunteers. Talking with a sense of entitlement tends to rub them the wrong way.
Click to expand...

As I stated in my post, I've gone to the mailing lists twice now. Not much I can do as a user at this point except bring attention to the next most logical place: the Off-Topic forum. There's clearly a number of developers that spend time on all sorts of things, clearly none of which is stuff for the average laptop user. I gather this based on the fact that there have literally been no improvements to anything a laptop user would benefit from in over a year and a half.

When the forum is littered with requests for help with things, it's surprising that the developers don't seem to take notice. The logical thing to me, seeing that there is an actual FreeBSD Foundation that decides some of the work that gets done, is say "maybe we should take a step back for a bit" then realize that some of the massive projects can be pushed back for a bit and they could try to bang out some of the smaller problems that completely prevent users from using the system (such as porting a mouse driver).

I'm not here feeling entitled to anything, but I am expressing my frustration that there have been no tangible improvements in a year and a half. If you want people to contribute, the people who are already contributing need to find ways to encourage new people to come aboard. I can't even begin to help if my mouse doesn't work.
 
The fact that there are more people that need stuff vs. people that can actually make them happen is true. Then again, there is also the $$$ problem.

I'm thinking on the other hand that if there would be enough people that require a certain feature, what would stop them from organizing a fund raiser (of course, talk to a developer beforehand) and then pay someone to get this feature imported.

Do you guys think this would work?

PS: I'm one of those who are willing, alongside others, to pay for getting certain features imported.
 
Q

jnbek said:
I have been a loyal FreeBSD user for well over a decade. Over the years, I've seen it go from a wealth of development on all kinds of things, to either stupid political arguments over GPL code, blatant denial of any work done towards a number of newer devices and options that should have been in the kernel years ago: ext4 read-write, XFS that doesn't suck, and an XFS read-write, btrfs, touchpads, write ALSA to talk to FreeBSD, praise God for Pulseaudio, at least that offers some level of consistency. Well all this is GPL. And thus deemed unworthy of FreeBSD attention. It seems that when someone asks, the answer is always:
  • "Do it yourself."
  • "Get your hands dirty."
  • "Oh, so and so got started on it back in 2007, read this useless thread."
Sadly, this is putting the death nails into what was once THE vibrant OS. The only reason FreeBSD hasn't gone the way of the dodo yet, is because of PF and ZFS. Both I use, both are built like a brick shithouse. I wish more time was spent making native FreeBSD support for read-write capabilities for all the modern filesystems, graphics drivers, etc.

Mad? Bitter? No, I am in deep sadness seeing all the BSDs getting left behind, for what I see, as internal political bull. I LOVE FreeBSD, but advocating it is near impossible anymore, just the same 'Secure, Stable and Easy to Maintain and an unbeatable network stack' only goes so far, when asked about the brand new 11n card, or btrfs kernel support. <$/22.22>
Click to expand...

Wants alone are not usually a priority here, especially when those wants are Linuxisms.

Also no offense, but if you aren't willing to assemble it yourself, then your destination is PC-BSD. Thank you drive through.
 
For hardware related issues I say stop complaining and buy a ~2005 Thinkpad ;)

However I must wonder why FreeBSD is a little bit behind on a few things. Perhaps some choices have been made earlier on that are slowing down progress. Such as (comparing to OpenBSD)...
  • We seem to be quite a bit behind OpenBSD when it comes to X11 and display drivers (especially on Intel cards). Could the reason for this that we are trying too hard to use the upstream version of X.Org rather than forking it (ala Xenocara)? This thing with dbus, hald and AutoAddDevices that no-one really likes is perhaps another symptom? Is staying compatible with the binary Nvidia driver holding us up?
  • Suspend to RAM is failing on quite a few machines I have tried. The ones that do work usually have minor issues such as requiring workarounds for USB mice dying. Does this suggest a much deeper issue in the kernel? Every single one of these machines I have tested is working with OpenBSD. Perhaps because OpenBSD supports more architectures more focus has been put into compatibility (which extends to ACPI support)?
  • Personally I love the fact that GNOME 3 is not yet in ports, however I wonder why it isn't? Is our packaging system less flexible or more likely to have a larger number of collisions with other ports?
FreeBSD seems to me like quite a large project (i.e the workload isn't spread over too many Linux distributions, it is the most popular *BSD) so it shouldn't really be behind any of the other *BSDs in many aspects.

That said, for server use FreeBSD offers some great stuff (i.e VirtualBox, ZFS) so I wonder if the FreeBSD development roadmap is mostly planned around its use as a server OS rather than a workstation/desktop unlike e.g. OpenBSD (which would be a bit of a shame but would explain all the points above).

I like FreeBSD and literally use it for every machine I own. However I sometimes wonder if I am using it as intended ;)
 
kpedersen said:
For hardware related issues I say stop complaining and buy a ~2005 Thinkpad ;)

However I must wonder why FreeBSD is a little bit behind on a few things. Perhaps some choices have been made earlier on that are slowing down progress. Such as (comparing to OpenBSD)...

1) We seem to be quite a bit behind OpenBSD when it comes to X11 and display drivers (especially on Intel cards). Could the reason for this that we are trying too hard to use the upstream version of Xorg rather than forking it (ala Xenocara). This thing with dbus, hald and "AutoAddDevices" that no-one really likes is perhaps another symptom?
Is staying compatible with the binary NVIDIA driver holding us up?

2) Suspend to RAM is failing on quite a few machines I have tried. The ones that do work usually have minor issues such as requiring workarounds for usb mice dying. Does this suggest a much deeper issue in the kernel? Every single one of these machines I have tested as working with OpenBSD. Perhaps because OpenBSD supports more architectures more focus has been put into compatibility (which extends to ACPI support)?

3) Personally I love the fact that Gnome 3 is not yet in ports, however I wonder why it isnt? Is our packaging system less flexible or more likely to have a larger number of collisions with other ports?

FreeBSD seems to me like quite a large project (i.e the workload isn't spread over too many linux distros, it is the most popular *BSD) so it shouldn't really be behind any of the other *BSDs in many aspects.

That said, for server use FreeBSD offers some great stuff (i.e VirtualBox, ZFS) so I wonder if the FreeBSD development roadmap is mostly planned around its use as a server OS rather than a workstation/desktop unlike i.e OpenBSD (which would be a bit of a shame but would explain all the points above).

I like FreeBSD and literally use it for every machine I own. However I sometimes wonder if I am using it as intended ;)
Click to expand...

Me too, I have a FreeBSD based file server, I have a FreeBSD based firewall and I have a FreeBSD laptop. I gave up on the suspend/hibernate functionality a long time ago, I've learned to live without it. I'll have to some research into OpenBSD. :)
 
thorbsd said:
When the forum is littered with requests for help with things, it's surprising that the developers don't seem to take notice. The logical thing to me, seeing that there is an actual FreeBSD Foundation that decides some of the work that gets done, is say "maybe we should take a step back for a bit" then realize that some of the massive projects can be pushed back for a bit and they could try to bang out some of the smaller problems that completely prevent users from using the system (such as porting a mouse driver).
Click to expand...

Generally, developers solve problems they or their employers have. Hardware drivers in particular are difficult to test without the actual hardware. It's really hard to get motivated to take on someone else's problems for fun. Most people have enough problems already.

I can't even begin to help if my mouse doesn't work.
Click to expand...

Install VirtualBox, install FreeBSD as a VM. Your hardware is instantly compatible and it does not overwrite existing operating systems. Also allows the use of more than one at a time.
 
wblock@ said:
Install VirtualBox, install FreeBSD as a VM. Your hardware is instantly compatible and it does not overwrite existing operating systems. Also allows the use of more than one at a time.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I wonder. If USB passthrough works on VirtualBox (and you are using a USB mouse) could you install a Linux/Windows VM on a FreeBSD host and expect the mouse to work in the VM? That would be pretty weird.

!! a And then, use something like sysutils/synergy to make the mouse move on the host.

Obviously this would be an awesome solution!

Edit: Should also work for USB wifi dongles. The lengths I would go to just to use FreeBSD on incompatible hardware ;)
 
USB passthrough works from host to guest. Making a Linux VM work as a device driver is probably going to be more difficult than porting a driver.
 
Incompatible hardware is the hardware vendor's fault and not FreeBSD's but I had no issue building my new workstation using all new parts including an i7-3770 processor on a Gigabyte motherboard with nVidia graphics and so on.
 
thorbsd said:
I can't even begin to help if my mouse doesn't work.
Click to expand...
Strange problem. I often forget to reattach my mouse to my desktop after using it to play on a laptop. It takes me a few minutes until I notice it is missing because some application can't be used without one. Neither i3, urxvt, Vim, Firefox, Chromium nor evince require a mouse for day to day usage.
 
Laptops are jolly hard work. I've had more luck with Linux, but that's hardly surprising as in the last couple of years it has absolutely rocketed ahead in hardware support - it's probably (speculatively) only bested by Windows 8 for 'out of the box' hardware support.

However, fundamentally, I'd use the same strategy as Linux, if one can: pick your hardware carefully. Pretty much anything with Nvidia is a good bet, apart from Optimus.

Touchpad and some function key support is irritating, but frankly it is only an annoyance. It will improve over time. I'm trying to develop the knowledge to contribute to some of these things, but I'm nowhere near yet.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Incompatible hardware is the hardware vendor's fault and not FreeBSD's but I had no issue building my new workstation using all new parts including an i7-3770 processor on a Gigabyte motherboard with nVidia graphics and so on.
Click to expand...

Erm.

Incompatible hardware is the system builder's fault, for not checking the hardware compatibility list prior to purchase.

Expecting the hardware vendor to support every OS ever made is unreasonable (And before people start with the "but why not the major ones?", bear in mind that Linux is barely a blip on the radar, and FreeBSD's share is even smaller than that. If you expect them to support FreeBSD, why not Haiku, AROS or Plan9? Where do we draw the line?). Expecting an OS to support every piece of hardware ever made, on day of release is also unreasonable.

Whether the OS in question is Windows, FreeBSD, VMware ESXi, Linux, etc.

Sure, if the hardware specification was open, things would be easier, but often it is not. There may be many reasons for this, be it licensed algorithms under NDA, perceived risk of losing a competitive advantage by giving away hardware implementation, or plain old "we want to keep it secret". Whether they release specifications or not is the OEM's perogative.

It is the system builder's responsibility to ensure that hardware compatible with the intended OS is selected.

OS vendors don't do hardware compatibility testing and publish a HCL for fun.
 
thorbsd said:
I loved using FreeBSD on my desktop, but it's unusable on my Dell XPS 15z laptop. I switched over to Linux, and everything works just fine.

I've posted to the driver mailing list twice with no response about getting the touchpad to work, I've got no idea if anyone is working on porting Bumblebee over (or working on code that works with the official nVidia drivers) so the Optimus nVidia card can be disabled, the LCD panel brightness buttons don't work, the DVD eject button doesn't work, and there is still no VT switching.

The touchpad is used in almost all the Dell XPS laptops, so surely there's a large number of people that would benefit from someone looking at fixing this problem.

No VT switching literally affects everyone. How could this still be disabled after more than a year? Is anyone even working on this?

Should I just accept that nobody working on FreeBSD has any desire to fix the problems laptop users face?
Click to expand...

Same thought here.

As I got new laptop recently FreeBSD is unusable on it as a desktop/workstation:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=41380

As my corporation also 'thinks' that Windows 7 is the 'standard' I use Windows 7 to boot and to provide 'drivers' for things like Nvidia Optimus and to use suspend/resume all the time and use FreeBSD directly on VirtualBox.

This way, although still far from perfect, it's more usable than running native FreeBSD.

As VirtualBox guest additions on FreeBSD do not support shared folders its very easy to fix that by adding a loopback Etherner adapter on Windows and add a network interface on VirtualBox with BRIDGE on that interface to have host-to-guest communication. I still use ZFS in that virtual machine for my data storage, so Windows is a 'guest' for Samba on FreeBSD to provide this data.

The VirtualBox graphics driver on the FreeBSD guest is also VERY SLOW and does not support acceleration (like VESA performance) but it's 'usable'.

Also VirtualBox save/resume of virtual machines has been broken on the FreeBSD host for about a year now, another thing to fix.

I can live without Nvidia Optimus on FreeBSD under one condition, that I would not have to disable it every time in the BIOS for FreeBSD to just boot. I do not use FreeBSD for gaming and if Intel graphics will be well supported on FreeBSD that is more than I need and I will have another OS (Linux/Windows) to use Optimus and Nvidia graphics with Optimus, but even that does not currently work.

I know that these things will be finally fixed, but probably in 2016 and not in 2014 even.

IMHO the FreeBSD Foundation should step up here and finally bring back the desktop/workstation to a usable state by founding the work if voluntary work is not up to the task anymore.
 
I guess some of the posters have been bit too harsh with "go to mailing lists" responses to the OP. He said he posted twice on the driver mailing list without any response. Just saying, don't kill me now.

Regards.
 
kpedersen said:
I like FreeBSD and literally use it for every machine I own. However I sometimes wonder if I am using it as intended ;)
Click to expand...
The hallmark of a true hacker is finding ways of using things that were never intended to be used like that ;)
 
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