GNOME goes PC-BSD

It's getting hot here, huh! To come back to the DEs... here is why I started this discussion:

Since last week I am trying to evaluate which is the best DE for FreeBSD - not for me but for a broader audience like the average office guy.

Non-IT people don't care about code quality, they want a nice and usable user interface without glitches or brainless workflows. So I looked at GNOME 2, KDE4 and Xfce4. And they all work sufficiently good, kind of... but none of them integrate well with FreeBSD. They come with a whole lot of stuff, dozens of dependencies, many of them unwilling to compile. All this is really frustrating!

The problem is that there are plenty of DEs for Linux and none which is tailored or targeted at FreeBSD. Why are GNOME, KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc. all compelling for the Linux desktop and no one tries to take the empty place on FreeBSD? Whose fault is this?

If I were the GNOME 3 developers and get so much negative criticism, I would gladly switch to FreeBSD, throw off all the Linux luggage and create a neatly integrated FreeBSD DE. With all valuable wishes and inputs from the BSD community.

Just my 2 cents...
 
Good advocacy for a FreeBSD demand, @vanessa, but it is a mystery today why developers are not interested enough to work on such DEs. The law of supply and demand doesn't work here as it's supposed to usually work. Seems that there are millions of reasons to say "NO".

I guess that developers have to respond to a user's demand(s), but how to do that? Well, being one of them is a good start :)
 
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GNOME 2 used to work quite well with FreeBSD around the 7.x era. Then this stuff with dbus etc. caused it to go downhill.

A full desktop environment is so darn time consuming. I tried it with OpenCDE. However, if we only focus on FreeBSD and each do a couple of applications each, perhaps we can get something good in ports in about 6 months if all the developers who frequent this forum chip in? ;)
 
cpm said:
Good advocacy for a FreeBSD demand, @vanessa, but is a mystery today to know why developers are not enough interested to work in such DEs. The law of supply & demand doesn't work here as it's supposed that usually works. Seems that there are miles and miles of millions reasons to say "NO".

Which is a pity then, at the end of day we still don't have a usable desktop. Blaming Linux for bad code or wrong decisions does't help either.

cpm said:
I guess the developers have to approach to user's demand(s), but how do that? Well, be one of them is a good start :)

And a very hard one! I can't even imagine replacing my OS X with GNOME, KDE or co. right now. The gap is still huge!
 
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kpedersen said:
Gnome 2 used to work quite well with FreeBSD around 7.x era. Then this stuff with dbus etc... caused it to go downhill.

A full desktop environment is so darn time consuming. I tried it with OpenCDE. However, if we only focus on FreeBSD and each do a couple of applications each, perhaps we can get something good in ports in about 6 months if all the developers who frequent this forum chip in? ;)

It even doesn't need those applications. What is more important is that graphics, sound, Bluetooth, WiFi, USB, video, mounting, CD burning, etc. work out of the box. If you start to compile GNOME or KDE you get so many "cute" options: ALSA, GStreamer, PulseAudio, VLC, oh hold on please - I need weeks to "plumb up" the "right" choice and combination, then configure them properly. It's really a mess.

Yes, I also think that if FreeBSD developers just copy the functionality of OS X (which is in fact FreeBSD based!) piece by piece, we could have the best free DE. And by re-inventing Quartz and QuickTime the half work would be done.
 
IMHO, having a TODO list is a breakthrough, when put into practice is another story. What could motivate to start up a new DE? Besides users' demands, tic-tac, tic-tac, exactly is a bunch of money :e

The current situation is not like to brag, and for this reason no one wants to do anything or move one finger for "love to technology".
 
cpm said:
Nifty post, @zspider. I'll save this quote with your permission. Truly, it was a big LOL :e

I got a laugh out of that too, permission granted.:p
 
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GNOME3? Not having that available for FreeBSD is not a very great loss, in my opinion. I cannot say which one I loathe more, Windows 8's Modern UI or GNOME3, I have tested both, and came to conclusion that I will not either install Windows 8 or any Linux distro having GNOME3 as default DE.
 
TiberiusDuval said:
GNOME3? Not having that available for FreeBSD is not a very great loss, in my opinion. I cannot say which one I loathe more, Windows 8's Modern UI or GNOME3, I have tested both, and came to conclusion that I will not either install Windows 8 or any Linux distro having GNOME3 as default DE.

So what are you working with on a day-by-day basis?
 
I use a combination of Windowmaker, GNOME2 and Compton. At work, on RHEL 6.4, at home on FreeBSD 9.1 and Arch Linux. It gives me sufficient eye-candy (shadows, transparency, geometry effects), a NeXTSTEP desktop workflow, and sufficient integration via GNOME2 services and end-user applications. Also, there's a GTK2-GNUstep widget theme which makes everything look unified. It even doesn't take much to configure it for interoperability.

So I really don't care about "the latest desktop". Windowmaker is maintained and completely stable. GNOME2 has been forked as MATE (I'm actually using MATE on Arch), and there are several light desktop compositors that can be used with any window manager.

Best of all, this stuff can even work under Cygwin, let alone a real *nix OS. Linuxisms don't concern me, until we come to *nix audio processing stuff. That's when I get pissed off.
 
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