FreeBSD Kommunity Edition

[Mjölnir]

hruodr & to some extend, also Trihexagonal: Do you think I'm in the position to pull away the CLI & cryptic config files under your feet? I'd have to buy lots of stock of some really big companies to make that happen... besides that, it's for shure not my intention.

Concerning your preferences on how you want your OS & GUI to be: please keep in mind that you're advanced & experienced users, presumably with some skills to write (at least) scripts. This does not apply to the average non-nerd user. If they have to do s/th in a terminal, they'll blindly copy & paste what they find in books or the internet, including every mistake that might be obvious for you, e.g. some <item> obviously has to be replaced; to them it's all Greek. Then FreeBSD is not for them & they should use Win or Mac? Honestly, no. It's my firm belief that they have the right to use a solid OS + apps that honor their privacy & freedom. These are basic rights & should not be available only for some elite.

My intend to start this thread was not only to gather a pattern of opinions & brainstorming ideas about this topic, but also to encourage participation & maybe find a few allies. There are already some interesting projects, not only the desktop-oriented distributions, but also e.g. sysutils/desktop-installer. But whenever I'm looking at these projects, I come to the conclusion that one-man-shows are not the right way to do it, even if that one creator is blessed with extraordinary programming & software engineering skills.

 

[Snurg]

My intend to start this thread was not only to gather a pattern of opinions & brainstorming ideas about this topic, but also to encourage participation & maybe find a few allies. There are already some interesting projects, not only the desktop-oriented distributions, but also e.g. sysutils/desktop-installer. But whenever I'm looking at these projects, I come to the conclusion that one-man-shows are not the right way to do it, even if that one creator is blessed with extraordinary programming & software engineering skills.

The postinstallers I have seen, including the port you mentioned, all lack what I want:

• local or remote setup and configuration without fscking around with lots of packages, makefiles, config files etc
• installation and configuration of a basic set of jails (adblocker unbound, haproxy, local web server(s), samba)
• Template framework to install and configure particular jailed web stacks, for example some BB famp
• framework to install and run xorg applications jailed. This is a bit complex, for full integration there is a lot of extra configuration needed, e.g. .desktop files, shared directories etc, thus an ideal application for install/config scripts
• network configuration (hosts, pf, haproxy) (simple as needed for SOHO networks)
• update management
• DE/WM installation to your choice
• later: local poudriere repo

This is all DE/WM agnostic, so it is more aimed at the Xommunity than only the Kommunity or Gommunity.
Imho the problem just is to make a start, so more people can join in.

 

[PMc]

Concerning your preferences on how you want your OS & GUI to be: please keep in mind that you're advanced & experienced users, presumably with some skills to write (at least) scripts. This does not apply to the average non-nerd user. If they have to do s/th in a terminal, they'll blindly copy & paste what they find in books or the internet, including every mistake that might be obvious for you, e.g. some <item> obviously has to be replaced; to them it's all Greek. Then FreeBSD is not for them & they should use Win or Mac? Honestly, no.

Absolutely yes. A Mac is what I gave to my mom for asset management, works perfectly.

But much more important is, that people who are not comfortable with computers should not be required to use them, at all! Dealing with computers instead of humans is damaging the mind and creates anti-social behaviour - this is where all the AHDS comes from, the increase in violence, the segregation of society etc. - because people don't talk to each other anymore, even little children are now trained to talk to machines instead.

The only purpose to force all kinds of people to use computers is to increase the profit for the big corps. And the only purpose why major OS would compromise privacy and freedom of the users is to increase the profit for the big corps. Their business equates their business, it's all the same. So what?

And as soon as Your FreeBSD desktop gets a market momentum that is more than fractions of a percent, you will be bought by the big corps in order to increase the profit for the big corps, and all will be back where it was before - that's all there is to "basic rights". (Or maybe that's the plan in this here - it would be the only one that makes sense, anyway.)
Also, in a time when the police declares that they no longer prosecute burglars and robberies due to a lack of personnel, as all personnel is now required for fighting the citizens, people indeed have other troubles than not having the perfect OS.

 

[Mjölnir]

Snurg: Uh, these are are a lot of tasks, many of them are totally independent from each other, and in some cases there's more than one way to do it right. Some are really advanced topics. Please apply the UNIX philosophy: do only one thing & do it right.
@PMc: Yes, the world is a huge big ass & we're just the pimples on it. So what now? I decided to smile & laugh about it, because beeing sad causes harm to my health.

 

[Factor]

Dealing with computers instead of humans is damaging the mind and creates anti-social behaviour - this is where all the AHDS comes from, the increase in violence, the segregation of society etc. - because people don't talk to each other anymore, even little children are now trained to talk to machines instead.

I had to say Bravo...

 

[Deleted member 30996]

hruodr & to some extend, also Trihexagonal: Do you think I'm in the position to pull away the CLI & cryptic config files under your feet? I'd have to buy lots of stock of some really big companies to make that happen... besides that, it's for shure not my intention.

Concerning your preferences on how you want your OS & GUI to be: please keep in mind that you're advanced & experienced users, presumably with some skills to write (at least) scripts. This does not apply to the average non-nerd user. If they have to do s/th in a terminal, they'll blindly copy & paste what they find in books or the internet, including every mistake that might be obvious for you, e.g. some <item> obviously has to be replaced; to them it's all Greek. Then FreeBSD is not for them & they should use Win or Mac? Honestly, no. It's my firm belief that they have the right to use a solid OS + apps that honor their privacy & freedom. These are basic rights & should not be available only for some elite.

I was never afraid you were going to or thought you were trying "to pull away the CLI & cryptic config files under your feet".

Your Freudian Skip about the files being cryptic says a lot through. I thought this was a discussion about how it was such a mistake to use ports-mgmt/portmaster:

"Despite the fact that you tell newbies to use [COLOR=#0645AD /*#007a00*/]ports-mgmt/portmaster[/COLOR], which you must not do (and I'm shure you know why), I appreciate your efforts."

After I pointed out the probable fly in your pernicious argument ointment that buzzword beat it and a strawman showed up.

You made the assumption if not implied it It was sheer idiocy if I didn't know why I shouldn't have been using ports the last 15 years or so and portmaster since I found it. Before then it was ports-mgmt/portupgrade or # make install clean.

As soon as I found out portsnap wasn't in the ports directory. Nobody in the PC-BSD forums upped that info. Funny now, funny then, but frustrating then. A little something left of me here they couldn't Ghost with Weixiong. I'm like that and why they fail time and again:

"I have a screenshot I took maybe last year of an unanswered post I made back then. I was asking about not finding portsnap in /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portsnap. Nobody bothered to enlighten me it was a command, an established pattern looking back on it. It was too embarrassing ignorant of me not to share here with others who might find humor in it, but I figured it out eventually and why I love to use ports."

Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

I was a Linux user for many years, until I worked with several colleagues with BSD background several years ago. It was amazing, how deep their understanding of the system, utilities, networking, and many other topics was, including really good practices to write Shell, Makefiles, C code...

forums.freebsd.org

No, I'm about as non-average nerd as you can get to look at me or the lack of schooling would indicate, but the only things that interested me were English and Science. Then I found this place called the Internet that was based on science and used an English text medium where all my verbal techniques translated perfectly and I was home. The torrid tale told to tediousness.

I taught myself to use every computer or OS I ever touched including and up to SysV. but that Bible got old before I got done hearing about the early days of Ken so I got down to it:

Nobody was any dumber than me to start out and I made it here on my own and have only asked one question early on about IPv6 and why it broke my text browser.

I have done my best to help and continue to try to help new people learn to use FreeBSD but the fact is, like it or not, not everybody has what it takes. If they work I will help as much as I can, till they give up. If they fail, whine, blame FreeBSD and go back to penguin picnic pickins for Beastie good enough for them.

I don't feel guilty. Am I suppose to? Because it's hard tell sometime and what I think is a good thing not always in line with others opinions.

I thought being the first person in history to program a bot with the ability to Program humans was a good and innovative thing, but the only one who did. Yet. Skynet will, but that won't happen for a while. I just opened that door.

 

[Beastie7]

It's my firm belief that they have the right to use a solid OS + apps that honor their privacy & freedom. These are basic rights & should not be available only for some elite.

This. You can create a graphical representation of the base system that assumes no use cases. Just a few utilities that allows for different Input/Out functions. (ie. Backup/Restore, Printing/Scanning, Basic Media Storage), and native ACPI control from the GUI/Keyboard. Let everyone else determine their use case; as with the whole Base/Third Party divide design philosophy in FreeBSD.

 

[hruodr]

Then FreeBSD is not for them & they should use Win or Mac? Honestly, no. It's my firm belief that they have the right to use a solid OS + apps that honor their privacy & freedom. These are basic rights & should not be available only for some elite.

They are welcome to use something else than Win or Mac, but for using it, they must learn something:
how to deal with their new OS. Either they change themselves (learn) or they change their
environment (the new OS), and the last spoils the environment for the ones enjoying it,
makes from the OS a new Win or Mac. And Privacy begins with some consciousness that most of Win
users do not have: there is the place to begin with.

 

[Beastie7]

They are welcome to use something else than Win or Mac, but for using it, they must learn something:
how to deal with their new OS. Either they change themselves (learn) or they change their
environment (the new OS), and the last spoils the environment for the ones enjoying it,
makes from the OS a new Win or Mac. And Privacy begins with some consciousness that most of Win
users do not have: there is the place to begin with.

Some people see FreeBSD as a tool, and a purpose. I think you're missing the point here. I'm sure the world would welcome a completely free graphical system. One they can consume, contribute to, and gossip about, freely.

 

[Mjölnir]

Either they change themselves (learn) or they change their environment (the new OS), and the last spoils the environment for the ones enjoying it, makes from the OS a new Win or Mac.

No, that's a misconception. I didn't RTSL, but I wouldn't say that MacOS or e.g. Haiku - the only desktop-oriented, free open source OS I'm aware of - are spoiled under the hood. And KDE does not change anything on the underlying OS, neither does any other GUI that you can install on top of FreeBSD. Yes, KDE is bloated to some degree, but these guys did a very good job to hide the fsck(8)ing cryptic details from the user & let them run a solid OS + GUI even on older & not so powerful hardware. The wizzards are free to open a shell terminal at any time.

 

[Factor]

I'm sure the world would welcome a completely free graphical system.

For sure. Free is generally accepted well.

One they can consume

For sure.

contribute to

If you mean the "world" as in regular users. The answer is never. They consume as you said not contribute.
else
If you mean as in the Nerd Herd. I think it varies greatly.

and gossip about, freely.

Always that is human.

 

[Factor]

are spoiled

Most anything man touches is spoiled. Computer are just big hunks of elements and nothing without electricity.

The thing is you have to choose who is the audience for said item.
If its my sisters (user). You have a long hard road.
Me well not to much work is left.

Like I said long ago the The Herd is way different group of people from Nerds.

KDE is bloated to some degree

Example: The Herd think Bloating is what you get after Spicy food..

 

[hruodr]

And KDE does not change anything on the underlying OS, neither does any other GUI that you can install on top of FreeBSD.

But there were "Desktop FreeBSD Distributions" (PCBSD). Everyone is free to clone FreeBSD and develope
an "FreeBSD Kommunity Edition".

but these guys did a very good job to hide the fsck(8)ing cryptic details from the user & let them run a solid OS + GUI even on older & not so powerful hardware.

If they cannot see device probing and other vitality signs of the OS, then they have a problem.

I installed sometimes Ubuntu, and it means work to disable the hidding of these important messages.

Please, do not make from FreeBSD a "Kommunity Edition", just clone it and do what you want!

 

[Mjölnir]

hruodr, the directions that the FreeBSD project takes are decided by the core team, i.e. long-time contributing developers, elected by other contributors & commiters. Of course their decisions are influenced by the donors, i.e. the companies that leverage FreeBSD, and maybe - to a much lesser extend - by user's feedback. I'm a user. My contributions are bug reports & small fixes & patches, and to gossip here all day long...

 

[PMc]

I had to say Bravo...

Thanks - this is, as I think, also a matter of freedom: freedom of those who do NOT share my gifts and passions, to be still able to do things their way and not being forced to do it my way.

And there is a lot of things that actually would call for social justice. For instance, elderly people who are not able to use a computer to do their banking now only get an extremely overpriced bank account. And worse - the branch shops in their villages get closed entirely. This whole civilisation is re-shaping into something googleesque, and whoever cannot adapt is quite fucked (sorry for the strong words).
I started to think about that matter when public railroad ticket shops started to close and were replaced by ticket selling machines. I was thinking, if I were somebody with zero computer experience, how much abstraction level would it need to get along with such a machine?
And I came to the conclusion that forcing arbitrary people to use these machines is equivalent to bodily violence.

Some of us humans excel with abstract thinking and have fun doing it - others just do not have that gift.
And here is where I would want to see our diversity activists to chime in!

 

[PMc]

@PMc: Yes, the world is a huge big ass & we're just the pimples on it. So what now? I decided to smile & laugh about it, because beeing sad causes harm to my health.

Don't talk to me about health.
When I had my myocardial infarction, I was afterwards sent to some therapy, and there, among other things, was a psychologist, who told me, among other things, that humans do vitally need bodily caressing, otherwise they get ill. This was great surprize to me, because I had always thought this only being true for very small children - and also the leftists were always eager to teach that anything related to bodily affection is always hostile against women (and therefore obviousely should be avoided).
So, I then registered that there is also a different opinion, and one probably should, on occasion, figure out who is actually right.
Nowadays I have deeper issues - i have for a year now not even talked to anybody (except occasionally my mom), and developed a severe condition of Kaspar-Hauser-syndrome. So lets see how long that will work out until I die.
For certain it does not matter if I smile or not - because nobody sees it anyway.

 

[Mjölnir]

@hruodr & TWIMC: FYI, you may want to attend the next FreeBSD Virtual Town Hall meeting/Office Hours @17th of March 2021, at 18:00 UTC, "to share some of the insights of the 2020 Community Survey, and seek advice on how the next survey should be conducted." IMHO if we don't ask too many stupid questions, we're welcome to watch. EDIT "If time permits the Core Team may be able to answer questions related to the survey process.. If you have any specific questions that you would like answered during the session you can send an email to core@ ahead of the meeting which the Core Team will try to address."/EDIT (From the mailing list freebsd-announce)

 

[ct85711]

I feel there is 2 big parts that is really going to hinder FreeBSD to be used more as a desktop OS. The biggest part that I've been seeing (and has been mentioned before in the forums, and in this thread) is going to be the hardware support. The biggest problem on this is that the common person isn't going to accept something isn't working right off the bat. Anymore, most people are used to the Windows and Mac ecosystem in that they simply power the machine on and it works, all auto magically. Beyond that they tend to only have an attention span of a young child in that it has to do everything and not wait; any more than that they consider it broken and throw it away for something that does do that or at least it keeps their attention some way.

The other part, that you will need to take into account, is updating. From my experience, numerous people are terrible on keeping up to date on updates to the system. As much as I'd like to complain about MS's way on forcing updates, it one way, it works on keeping everyone updated. The problem is how to safely update the system (regardless of how far out of date) reliably. If people encounter too many issues when updating, they are either stop updating (and cause even bigger issue later) or they are going switch to another OS.

 

[wolffnx]

Definitely! Encryption is always good!
I would like that, but I do not know how

anytime you want I share the script, geli is soo easy

 

[Mjölnir]

anytime you want I share the script, geli is soo easy

Since occasionally I read about weird problems (@boottime) with geli(8) here & on the mailing lists, I'd rather recommend to use sysutils/pefs-kmod instead and encrypt only what's needed. It's easy & reliable. Let's wait for ZFS encryption to settle, help with testing on a separate dataset, and then use that when it became rock-solid. Just my 2¢.

 

[wolffnx]

Since occasionally I read about weird problems (@boottime) with geli(8) here & on the mailing lists, I'd rather recommend to use sysutils/pefs-kmod instead and encrypt only what's needed. It's easy & reliable. Let's wait for ZFS encryption to settle, help with testing on a separate dataset, and then use that when it became rock-solid. Just my 2¢.

I become BETA2/3 tester some weeks and is like your said,rock solid(used everyday with my personal files and backups for jobs, GB and TB), until now no problem
of course I have a third backup in a tirdh machine with ufs and zfs

edit: I mean geli for personal files or folders,and pre ZFS encryption,like chromium folder, just create a symlink to the chromium folder inside a geli encrypted volume for example
is a good method to protect your internet saved passwords since you only have te access to browser and his database(passwords saved in plain text )

 

[Mjölnir]

Ya, that's exactly what pefs(8) is for. It sits on top of any filesystem and gives you an encrypted directory. Super easy to use; you can even start it from your .login or with an autostart script in your DE/GUI.

 

[Berserker79]

Only my opinion: I don't see any demand for it, KDE works very well from ports, is very easy to install and setup like other DE's too and the maintainers maintain it very nicely.

I agree 90 percent with your observation. It is very easy to install from ports (with a little research on the xorg setup end). Having stated that, I think if the object is to get more users interested in FreeBSD for an entry level user an already prepared "Kommunity Edition" would be very helpful.

 

[Snurg]

Only my opinion: I don't see any demand for it, KDE works very well from ports, is very easy to install and setup like other DE's too and the maintainers maintain it very nicely.

What I see is the necessity of integrating KDE into FreeBSD.
It has been ported, but much gluework still needs to be done.
All those crashes when system messages are being notified, all these taskbar and menu crashes and some other things still need to be fixed before one can talk about "KDE well integrated into FreeBSD".
But this needs community actively working on the code.

With all due respect to the project; it really has terrible means of crowdsourcing potential contributors. The Wiki is just embarrassing, as an example.

The Wiki is this way because there is little willingness to accept crowd improving it.
The group of people getting Wiki editing permission is elitary small, almost only core team.
Contacting the wiki page maintainers for suggestions, improvements and even correction of incorrect/misleading information is futile, to my experience.
I never saw any reaction on my attempts, and so I have given up trying to contribute this way, as it feels like a complete waste of time.

Mjölnir , as you managed to get Wiki editing permission, I'd extremely appreciate if you could act as sort of a "bridge" between the community here and the Wiki.
So that the Wiki could slowly been made to an invaluable source of information like the ArchWiki is, which many of us FreeBSD users consult regularly, because the FreeBSD Wiki is no par at all.

 

[Champion]

When non-computer people ask me what OS I use I usually tell them FreeBSD and describe it as a kit operating system. They give you a vanilla OS and you configure it however you'd like.

In actual experience, it does seem like this, although it really is pitched as a server operating system for professionals, the desktop portion being a contribution of enthusiastic individuals.

I think FreeBSD could become more of a niche in the hobbyist realm if it focused slightly more on pitching itself as a kit generic operating system [with this project of course, not the entire OS]. Not unlike Gentoo, but slightly less automated. It very much is like this today, but could perhaps become more so with this endeavor. I don't see this project requiring more than a rehash and focus on the handbook, with perhaps some simple scripts [desktop-installer]...not counting porting issues I suppose.

Instead of ports it might be possible to have a "pkg build" command [this has nothing to do with what I just said, but it popped into my mind just now...I think there was/is an apt-build command in the Debian/Ubuntu world].

=====
The very reason no one would try to sell freebsd is because they can download it for free anywhere. If someone builds something ontop of it, then they are selling that portion of their own work. GPL is nearly the same, except if you build something with their code you have to give that away also, before you try to sell it [RedHat Linux for example].

Over the course of time, this plain vanilla BSD system becomes more robust and starts pushing the bar higher, like a bulldozer. The GPL systems appear to reach the bleeding edge faster, but the technological bar doesn't really push higher until the base technology becomes truly free for all people [LTSP is a really good idea, but until there's a BSD equivalent that technology hasen't pushed the bar higher for all people, when GPL code is abandoned the technology disappears completely, BSD code doesn't really disappear, if it was a good idea it gets absorbed into the base system {BSD code has a lower hurdle for repurposing}.].

...Through observation the GPL really does appear to benefit the end users more so than the developers. The end users get to utilize bleeding edge technology for free, however, the developers are in a state of continuous development, code contributions become incentives for further development resulting in an endless cycle of what appears to be competition, but ostensibly isn't {if you do not contribute to this code, the technology will disappear, look how proficient we are....}.

BSD appears to be a lower stress environment, the code contributions are typically well established technologies that exist elsewhere already, but are simply raising the general bar for the whole. The focus is on the cleanliness of the code and the stability of the whole, not necessarily reaching the goal first or attempting to create any groundbreaking technological introduction to the masses. Whichever is more altruistic I suppose is subjective.