Hey all,
This problem isn't really specific to FreeBSD but I am getting a little tired of the multitude of broken or novelty desktop environments around these days in open source operating systems. I am honestly finding myself starting to recommend Mac OS X to the students that I teach OpenGL to just to have something a little bit usable on their desktops.
So finally, I have committed some future time to actually cleaning up the existing GNOME 2 desktop and stripping away the parts that do not work and tailoring it 100% to FreeBSD. I have just created a project repo on GitHub and it would be great if anyone here would come on board and even forward the word. I feel that even though I am just cleaning the desktop up, it is still going to take quite a bit of manpower to polish but it is certainly going to be worth it to get a FreeBSD specific DE without implementing one from scratch.
You can read the project's aims here: https://github.com/osen/imp
The project is aiming to be monolithic (which CDE has shown to actually be quite easy to maintain in the long run) and if one port at a time is brought into the repo from the ports collection and the patches committed, it shouldnt be so hard. The goals obviously differ slightly from Mate because FreeBSD is going to be the first class citizen in this project and as such it should prove to be very maintainable for years to come without needing to play catchup. The other main difference is that all files will be localized to /usr/local/imp and $HOME/.imp.
The gnome@ team probably have their hands full endlessly wrangling with GNOME 3 but I will be contacting them too once I get something working.
Cheers,
Karsten
This problem isn't really specific to FreeBSD but I am getting a little tired of the multitude of broken or novelty desktop environments around these days in open source operating systems. I am honestly finding myself starting to recommend Mac OS X to the students that I teach OpenGL to just to have something a little bit usable on their desktops.
So finally, I have committed some future time to actually cleaning up the existing GNOME 2 desktop and stripping away the parts that do not work and tailoring it 100% to FreeBSD. I have just created a project repo on GitHub and it would be great if anyone here would come on board and even forward the word. I feel that even though I am just cleaning the desktop up, it is still going to take quite a bit of manpower to polish but it is certainly going to be worth it to get a FreeBSD specific DE without implementing one from scratch.
You can read the project's aims here: https://github.com/osen/imp
The project is aiming to be monolithic (which CDE has shown to actually be quite easy to maintain in the long run) and if one port at a time is brought into the repo from the ports collection and the patches committed, it shouldnt be so hard. The goals obviously differ slightly from Mate because FreeBSD is going to be the first class citizen in this project and as such it should prove to be very maintainable for years to come without needing to play catchup. The other main difference is that all files will be localized to /usr/local/imp and $HOME/.imp.
The gnome@ team probably have their hands full endlessly wrangling with GNOME 3 but I will be contacting them too once I get something working.
Cheers,
Karsten