J
Josh Smith
Guest
Hey PC-BSDers!
Some of you may have heard the speculation surrounding the last couple weeks of development here at the PC-BSD project, and I’d like to go ahead and address those rumors in today’s post. We know there has been a large amount of misinformation circulating so we recommend that all of our users please read the following explanation so the information is clear.
For the last couple of months we have been beating our heads against the wall trying to find a way to put us on par with the best Linux distros out there such as Ubuntu. During a phone meeting on Monday between Kris, Dru, Ken and myself (Josh), we began tossing around ideas on how we can make that happen. One of the ideas that was presented was making Lumina DE the only supported desktop environment in PC-BSD and by doing so focus all of our development time exclusively on it. Ken Moore argued that if we could create a desktop environment that everyone loved, and “Unify” the user experience, that no one would have any reason ever to use anything else because it was the best. Although we did toss the idea around for a while we thought that might be a little bit of an issue with a few of our users that like to use other crappy desktop environments.
After an hour of spirited back and forth debate, many good ideas were presented. As we all took a moment during our video call to think about the ideas that were just discussed, I interrupted the awkward silence and told the rest of the group about an idea I had been thinking about for a few days. “What if we could do something even better than Unify the user experience…What if we could make the system boot extremely fast”. I explained that if we could hard code a “boot shim” so to speak into the kernel, that we could be the fastest booting unix-like distribution out there. We all looked at each other and started to realize this was the “holy grail” so to speak that we had been looking for. After perusing the internet for about 3 and a half minutes we found out there was already a Linux solution available.
We hammered out the details and now want to present you with our new “Everything Manager” the new SystemBS-D. Most of you are familiar with how we can port different types of Linux software and run them through our emulation layer. Using the same emulation magic we have taken what one kid that lives on my street called “the best piece of software ever. The end.”, and ported it over to PC-BSD. SystemBS-D not only makes your system boot faster, but it can basically manage everything on your system as well. Sure it still crashes a lot and it has trouble displaying log files, but we’re working on that. In a discussion with Kris Moore he stated “SystemBS-D may be unstable, but it DID make the system boot super fast. I feel like that’s a pretty good trade.”
Taking cues from other popular software companies we have also thought about integrating a really cool storefront into PC-BSD and making people look at it before they can go to their desktop. We could also consider locking down the user’s system with “grub-lock” so no other operating systems could be installed on it… oops I meant “secure” the user’s system.
We look forward to hearing your feedback on these new developments.
P.S. if you thought any of this was real look at the date on your computer. Happy 1st!
Best Regards,
Josh
Continue reading...
Some of you may have heard the speculation surrounding the last couple weeks of development here at the PC-BSD project, and I’d like to go ahead and address those rumors in today’s post. We know there has been a large amount of misinformation circulating so we recommend that all of our users please read the following explanation so the information is clear.
For the last couple of months we have been beating our heads against the wall trying to find a way to put us on par with the best Linux distros out there such as Ubuntu. During a phone meeting on Monday between Kris, Dru, Ken and myself (Josh), we began tossing around ideas on how we can make that happen. One of the ideas that was presented was making Lumina DE the only supported desktop environment in PC-BSD and by doing so focus all of our development time exclusively on it. Ken Moore argued that if we could create a desktop environment that everyone loved, and “Unify” the user experience, that no one would have any reason ever to use anything else because it was the best. Although we did toss the idea around for a while we thought that might be a little bit of an issue with a few of our users that like to use other crappy desktop environments.
After an hour of spirited back and forth debate, many good ideas were presented. As we all took a moment during our video call to think about the ideas that were just discussed, I interrupted the awkward silence and told the rest of the group about an idea I had been thinking about for a few days. “What if we could do something even better than Unify the user experience…What if we could make the system boot extremely fast”. I explained that if we could hard code a “boot shim” so to speak into the kernel, that we could be the fastest booting unix-like distribution out there. We all looked at each other and started to realize this was the “holy grail” so to speak that we had been looking for. After perusing the internet for about 3 and a half minutes we found out there was already a Linux solution available.
We hammered out the details and now want to present you with our new “Everything Manager” the new SystemBS-D. Most of you are familiar with how we can port different types of Linux software and run them through our emulation layer. Using the same emulation magic we have taken what one kid that lives on my street called “the best piece of software ever. The end.”, and ported it over to PC-BSD. SystemBS-D not only makes your system boot faster, but it can basically manage everything on your system as well. Sure it still crashes a lot and it has trouble displaying log files, but we’re working on that. In a discussion with Kris Moore he stated “SystemBS-D may be unstable, but it DID make the system boot super fast. I feel like that’s a pretty good trade.”
Taking cues from other popular software companies we have also thought about integrating a really cool storefront into PC-BSD and making people look at it before they can go to their desktop. We could also consider locking down the user’s system with “grub-lock” so no other operating systems could be installed on it… oops I meant “secure” the user’s system.
We look forward to hearing your feedback on these new developments.
P.S. if you thought any of this was real look at the date on your computer. Happy 1st!
Best Regards,
Josh
Continue reading...