thortos said:No, quite the opposite. If they come along and say "here, we provide you with a desktop variant of FreeBSD", they cannot lean back and go "OK, FreeBSD devs, now you give our users what they want". After all, those users who *are* interested in running FreeBSD on modern notebooks and with cheap hardware are *right there in the DesktopBSD/PC-BSD support channels* and can contribute, and if only through giving feedback on what they want and testing of modifications.
As somebody else said, there's few FBSD developers, and they're busy as it is. The very least the PC-BSD and DesktopBSD people can do is contribute to the FreeBSD code base, making it more desktop/notebook-friendly. I don't know if they do, but I sure know they should. Otherwise they're just leeches.
For example all the manpower that went into the pointless PBI infrastructure could as well have been used to implement a graphical ports/packages manager and contribute it back to FreeBSD. This way everyone would have benefitted. As it is, only PC-BSD users "benefit", and how starting a parallel software universe is a benefit to anyone is still up for discussion. For all I know they could be distributing trojans with all applications, because I cannot verify those proprietary binary files one way or the other.
Yes, me too. I also was delighted when DesktopBSD and PC-BSD started their work, but the lack of manpower shows. I'm not contributing to them myself, so I won't complain, but I observe that given more love, they could really give Ubuntu a serious beating.
Do you think so? I was for some years an active member of the DesktopBSD-Team - a couple of people. There is no money, there is a shortage of time etc.pp. and there is almost no interest by the media to see another alternative on the desktop. It's different with PCBSD, they have some money but it's not comparable to the ressources of Ubuntu. So some love will not help at all.