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

scottro said:
one sees more Windows like problems, such as GUI issues preventing a system from booting.
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That's more of a free desktop problem, and in particular that is more of a problem with GNOME 3 being an absolute embarrassment to the open-source community. Windows never fails to boot because of its desktop environment.
 
Yes, I saw your post on the Fedora forums. It's not just GNOME3 though, I've seen that issue on Fedora forums for years.

I should have added that my statements are based on very anecdotal evidence, just things I notice from talking with people, viewing forums, and the like.
 
My theory is that if I keep reminding the Fedora / RedHat folks that GNOME 3 is a failure, by the time it gets ported to FreeBSD, we will have something usable ;)
 
Ok, that was a literal LOL.

My own feeling, and again, this is just my opinion, is that way back when, there was less of a divide between system administrators and developers. Later, when it was no longer necessary to be a coder to be a sysadmin, the line got a little broader, but nowadays, many of the Linux developers seem to have little thought of the system as a server. This isn't necessarily bad for something like Fedora--and indeed, I think that Ubuntu's attempt to create "Linux for human beings," as they phrased it, did the entire open source community good, raising the awareness, and making both hardware and software vendors to think about supporting it.

As I said, I can easily argue either side, depending upon my mood.
 
tingo said:
If "user friendly" means "support people who don't want to spend any time learning something new" I'm all against it.
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I associate myself with that completely. People need to stop being apathetic to learning, especially at the expense of people who actually do want to learn and who enjoy it.

The OP should read this article. http://vtbsd.net/notwindows.html
 
tingo said:
If "user friendly" means "support people who don't want to spend any time learning something new" I'm all against it.
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I'll second that.

What I realize now is why I also quit Linux, one part of the steaming barrel of reasons that drove me away. Learning is investment of time and resources to gain something. Something of worth. If it is not worth the resources to you, you will not do it. So - when you start learning something in Linux and the carpet is pulled out from under you, again and again, because of the rapid changes in the APIs, the components, the continuing hunt for integrating the next to be obsolete way of doing something, then your time and effort are spent on things whose worth has a pretty short "best before" label. Learning how to handle udev? Why? Who can tell you the thing will be around in half a year? So you start to botch things together with digital duct tape.
 
Crivens said:
Why? Who can tell you the thing will be around in half a year?
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I also agree with this thought. I have no interest in wasting my time learning things that are going to disappear in months to come. I am however very happy to learn stuff that is going to remain for many many years. This is generally why I like *BSD. It doesn't change for the sake of change.

There is always the argument of "nothing lasts for ever" but to be honest, I am not bothered if it doesn't. Just so long as it lasts longer than my lifespan ;)
 
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?
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I understand your frustration, but as I understand it the issue with KMS and switching to X.Org is a very deep and non trivial problem that involves a great deal of work to get right. There are not, to my knowledge, large teams of volunteers working on this either. I may be wrong but I believe there are only two people who commit themselves to this task. We should be grateful for their contributions and be patient.

For the other issues about your touchpad, I am certain you can get help from users here!

I don't agree with your view that laptop users are neglected as I exclusively use FreeBSD on my Toshiba laptop as do a lot of other people. It takes a bit of time to configure things so everything works to my taste. If you do not have time to do all of the required configuration or only have one machine, perhaps a better option for you might be to try PC-BSD or another operating system. You could still run FreeBSD in an emulator.
 
neilms said:
I understand your frustration, but as I understand it the issue with KMS and switching to X.Org is a very deep and non trivial problem that involves a great deal of work to get right. There are not, to my knowledge, large teams of volunteers working on this either. I may be wrong but I believe there are only two people who commit themselves to this task. We should be grateful for their contributions and be patient.

For the other issues about your touchpad, I am certain you can get help from users here!

I don't agree with your view that laptop users are neglected as I exclusively use FreeBSD on my Toshiba laptop as do a lot of other people. It takes a bit of time to configure things so everything works to my taste. If you do not have time to do all of the required configuration or only have one machine, perhaps a better option for you might be to try PC-BSD or another operating system. You could still run FreeBSD in an emulator.
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I've put FreeBSD on three laptops over the years and it's usually worked pretty well. Additionally, the GEM/KMS stuff works pretty well considering how few people are working on it.
 
zspider said:
I associate myself with that completely. People need to stop being apathetic to learning, especially at the expense of people who actually do want to learn and who enjoy it.

The OP should read this article. http://vtbsd.net/notwindows.html
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Being willing to learn is not the same thing as being willing to put up with stuff that is difficult because the OS vendor can't be bothered to make it simpler.

It shouldn't have to be difficult. Brain power wasted on say, setting up a printer or getting a sane desktop environment set up is brain power that can and should be spent on more important problems.

This is why I currently run a Mac desktop (still use FreeBSD where it is appropriate, on servers). I've been there, done that with Unix desktop environments (I've run pretty much all of them between 1996 and 2006) and to be honest I have better things to be doing with my time these days.

Could I figure it out? Sure. Is it time I am willing to spend any more? No. Not when a usable alternative that takes zero brain power to make usable already exists. Dont' get me wrong, there are things about OS X I dislike, but seriously, I swear, the amount of time some people must spend on R&D to get a usable free Unix desktop far outweighs any realistic productivity gain achieved.

Now this isn't FreeBSD specific - but until the Unix desktop kids (GNOME/KDE) stop breaking things and deprecating everything every couple of years it's going to remain marginalized lacking support from third parties.
 
throAU said:
It shouldn't have to be difficult. Brain power wasted on say, setting up a printer or getting a sane desktop environment set up is brain power that can and should be spent on more important problems.
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I respect your point of view, but my experience is different. I don't find it's a waste of brain power because once you get things set up they (usually :) ) just work. For example, to set up a printer I used @wblock's guide and it wasn't a hassle at all. I find using some sort of wizard to set things up is often a waste of brain power because you don't learn how things really work. If something goes wrong you might be helpless.

throAU said:
This is why I currently run a Mac desktop (still use FreeBSD where it is appropriate, on servers). I've been there, done that with Unix desktop environments (I've run pretty much all of them between 1996 and 2006) and to be honest I have better things to be doing with my time these days. ... until the Unix desktop kids (GNOME/KDE) stop breaking things and deprecating everything every couple of years it's going to remain marginalized lacking support from third parties.
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I've stayed away from these desktop environments and stuck with simple window managers. I've tried to embrace the Unix way of doing things, that is, at the terminal. So, give me a decent browser and a descent terminal emulator and I'm happy.

throAU said:
Could I figure it out? Sure. Is it time I am willing to spend any more? No. Not when a usable alternative that takes zero brain power to make usable already exists.
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I have my own guides similar to what @taz posted and I'm up and running quickly. Again, I'm not trying to dismiss your experience, just countering with mine. I can relate to some of your points and the comparison isn't black and white, but grey and subjective. For example, it's a bit of an inconvenience to not be able to switch to a virtual terminal after having started Xorg. Suspend and resume on my laptop would be nice, but other than that things are very good. For me (but not you), the downsides to running a Mac far outweigh these inconveniences.
 
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I can understand both sides of the argument kind of. However, what the developers of the various open source desktop environments have kept promising is that their DEs would be real alternatives to commercial offerings, as easy to use and configure as the commercial counterparts and would work on the same hardware. Almost all of these promises have been empty in my eyes so far. It's the average user that does not have the skills or the time to tinker with low level settings to fix problems that decides if a DE or any similar system is usable for wider audience or not.
 
I'd say quite a big problem is that many open source desktop environments use Linux-only solutions. Like for example how to attach a removable drive from a GUI? PC-BSD solves this by adding its own mountray application, which at most times works adequately.

On other hand, desktop environments do not work as flawlessly as in some commercial OS'es even under Linux, not even in some very desktop oriented distributions like Ubuntu. Try doing any non-standard stuff, and you will need a shell quite fast.
 
jrm said:
I respect your point of view, but my experience is different. I don't find it's a waste of brain power because once you get things set up they (usually :) ) just work. For example, to set up a printer I used @wblock's guide and it wasn't a hassle at all. I find using some sort of wizard to set things up is often a waste of brain power because you don't learn how things really work. If something goes wrong you might be helpless.
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You know what I had to do to print? I plugged the printer in, hit print and selected it. One minute, job done. The page comes out and I go do something more productive.

I don't actually care how the internals of printing work, I just want a page with text to come out. I'd rather spend the brain power on firewall rule-sets, anti-spam configuration, WAN troubleshooting, company datacenter refresh design or whatever. If something goes wrong, fair enough I will engage the brain. But for the common case, making everybody jump through hoops is a waste of time.

Personal computers have been printing since the 1980s. It shouldn't require you to follow a guide to make it work any more than I should need a guide to operate my telephone to make a voice call. This isn't some exotic, uncommon edge case for PC usage we're talking about here.


edit:
This is from an idealistic end user perspective. Yes, making the code do all that in a sane and reliable manner is probably hard. But the typical end user doesn't care.
 
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throAU said:
But for the common case, making everybody jump through hoops is a waste of time.

Personal computers have been printing since the 1980s. It shouldn't require you to follow a guide to make it work any more than I should need a guide to operate my telephone to make a voice call. This isn't some exotic, uncommon edge case for PC usage we're talking about here.
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I'm with you here, mostly. But one thing you should try is to check what a hoop is and what is not by consulting some complete computer-illiterate. Because what is normal for us maybe some hoop for them, and what we think is a hoop may come natural to others.

In the desktop environments (GNOME/KDE/...) there usually is the attempt to reshape the hoop so the users can pass them better while their main target kernel/OS tries to reshape some other hoops - so the DE changes the square peg for a round one while the OS feature group is refitting a starshape receptable instead of the round one because is covers more edge cases.

The reasons for this can be many, acute spells of featuritis, hard cases of NIH syndrome or simply reinventing the wheel because 'we can'. In commercial areas this is often the beancounters (cut the last cent from the product), the marketing (make it different) or necessity (the parts are no longer available). To come back to your example, if all printers were to speak postscript there would be no problem. We would have standardised postscript renderers as ASICs by now, but they would not be different from the other brands, would (at the beginning) be more expensive and would make it harder to add fisher-price-type features. Engineers would love them, marketing would weep and the accountants would try to argue for a cardboard case because it would be cheaper.

Instead we have a zillion of win-printers. We do not have Display PostScript with hardware acceleration. Because we are not all engineers, we are humans.
 
Who the hell knows said:
Talk is cheap, unless it's a 900 number.
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Those projects which have my attention are those which will bring FreeBSD closer to the mainstream. Expecting the business and normal world to accept without testing is being silly.
  1. What can you do?
  2. What do you do with FreeBSD?
  3. Is anyone near you that can use it as part of their business, home, or social life?
Developers are more down to earth and usually help when asked - in a kind and human way, of course. Don't abuse this privilege.

The people I have introduced FreeBSD - and Linux - to are not programmers. Some of them need more time learning about computers; however, they all understand and see the differences along with the options of customizing the two mentioned systems.

I'll disagree and say that forking does help providing that doing such produces better results.
 
Why is "mainstream" a goal? Doesn't "mainstream" imply that something (in this case FreeBSD) is the same as everybody else?
 
tingo said:
Why is "mainstream" a goal? Doesn't "mainstream" imply that something (in this case FreeBSD) is the same as everybody else?
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If having working graphics acceleration and relatively long work on battery are 'mainstream', then yes, I need 'mainstream' goals.
 
tingo said:
Why is "mainstream" a goal? Doesn't "mainstream" imply that something (in this case FreeBSD) is the same as everybody else?
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No. In this case, FreeBSD as the base for audio production on different architectures becomes an option. Musicians and artists like backup systems, especially those that allow the user complete control over the conversion process.
 
Crivens said:
Instead we have a zillion of win-printers. We do not have Display PostScript with hardware acceleration. Because we are not all engineers, we are humans.
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Oh of course, I didn't say it would be easy. I'm wearing my "living in fantasy land" idealist hat here.

My point, I guess was that assuming that people who want things to be user friendly are muppets or mildly retarded is simply living in denial and passing the problem off as not significant, when in actual fact it is a massive collective time sink for humanity, if you add up the total man hours wasted by every end user. I was just using the printing mentioned above as an example.

User friendly doesn't have to mean inflexible or otherwise brain-damaged.

People who say stuff like:

If "user friendly" means "support people who don't want to spend any time learning something new" I'm all against it.
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Are simply furthering the problem and wasting everybody's time. Time that some pharmacist could be spending curing cancer (for example) instead of screwing around trying to print (a problem that humanity has solved countless times before).

Printing (for example) is something that pretty much every user will want to do, and something that should not require significant time investment to accomplish. Setting up a machine to print isn't "learning something new" - it is simply wheel re-invention. Wheel re-invention is BAD. Far better to spend time learning something new which wasn't already learned millions of times before by other people! I thought this was a core concept behind the BSD style license?

Printing is merely one example (not even the most awkward) of something which "shouldn't" be so hard. I'm fully aware there are reasons that it is difficult in reality, but simply passing the problem off as nothing to be concerned about (or worse, being hostile regarding users it imapcts) is living in denial.

Computers are meant to make life easier and for the vast majority of the population computing is a means to an end, not an end goal itself. I think sometimes people forget that.
 
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