Is there a real interest in pushing FreeBSD on the desktop space?

Funny. I fixed the prompt. The images in the Wikipedia link looked like frankestein lab's item. You can call them graphical interface if you invoque the freedom of speech.
 
Last edited:
smithi said:
Never mind, just being lazy ... see Wikipedia for the gory details, including many names such as Douglas Englebart, Alan Kay et al.
Click to expand...
Tomorrow I'm going to lunch with a retired friend. He was a young electrical engineer on the Alto group, and he implemented the first ethernet board for Robert Metcalfe. Xerox PARC is a fascinating place: So many great ideas were born there. And many of them died right there, while some of them ended up being great things implemented by others. While the relationship between the corporate research labs (Bell Labs, IBM Research, HP Labs, Digital CRL/WRL/SRC..., Xerox PARC, ...) and their corporate parents was always fraught with problem, and most of them had a spotty track record productizing their ideas, PARC was by far the most ineffective.
 
ralphbsz said:
While the relationship between the corporate research labs (Bell Labs, IBM Research, HP Labs, Digital CRL/WRL/SRC..., Xerox PARC, ...) and their corporate parents was always fraught with problem, and most of them had a spotty track record productizing their ideas, PARC was by far the most ineffective.
Click to expand...
Well, i am in my laptop now. I do not know CRL/WRL/SRC. I know Bell Labs in physics science, the research group got ideas in xrays applied in cristal. What it had to do with telephones lines is not in issue. IBM Research is a question about what it accomplished apart from shrinking the mainframe into a home desk. I have to give credit to the creators of the early interfaces in PC. Jobs only stood in their work.
 
Last edited:
astyle said:
Xorg...
Click to expand...

Now hold on there, before you jump to conclusions... (and disregarding that condescending language).

I didn't say I supported putting a default GUI either. I don't. It's fine the way it is now.

All I meant was that if (Gord forbid) the proponents of that idea got enough critical mass to make it happen, It would be a way to say 'see we did something about it' without compromising too much.
 
All I meant was that if (Gord forbid) the proponents of that idea got enough critical mass to make it happen, It ...
Click to expand...
Wait, what? Last time critical mass was something was in physics, the nuclear kind. It is the minimal radium to create a nuclear reaction. Go ahead.
 
not messing. that is a scientific term used in physics since man and woman found a way to split the atom. the quantum physics that Bohr had to learn was but his first failure to the next step in the ladder.
Of course the man got the nobel in physics.

Stil TWM is minimal indeed. I
 
Rock said:
not messing. that is a scientific term used in physics since man and woman found a way to split the atom. the quantum physics that Bohr had to learn was but his first failure to the next step in the ladder.
Of course the man got the nobel in physics.

Stil TWM is minimal indeed. I
Click to expand...
Uhhh... see these definitions of 'critical mass': https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/critical mass and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass_(sociodynamics) ?

Physics is not the only place where this is valid English vocabulary.
 
vienuolis said:
I have missed one of the most important arguments for me in this forum thread: decentralization of the net, independence, sovereignty, autonomy of each human being — that is why I have been here in FreeBSD and NomadBSD for a year now, after escaping from MS Windows. Where, as on Mac and Android, you are now not the owner, but a "user" who is allowed to carry out certain prescribed and, increasingly, mandatory actions. Over-powered, semi-empty computers are now humming, groaning, clattering, heating up still without any task from you — because they first have to perform many tasks from the real master of your computer.

The internet was invented as a decentralized way of partisan resistance to possible Soviet occupation during the Cold War — the destruction of one or more servers would not disrupt the network. Nowadays, every home computer has enough power and capacity for not only client but also server applications. Opera Unite proved this thirteen years ago (unfortunately, the project was soon bought out and immediately cancelled).

I do not play games, do not watch Netflix movies, do not read centralized agency media. I aim to adapt my server and my home computer to the open standards for HTTP, NNTP, UUCP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, JMAP, WebDAV, WebRTC, XMPP, Fediverse, P2P communication, WWW publication, and for writing, image, audio, video content creation.

With FreeBSD, I am the real master of my computers, an independent publisher, and a sovereign internet member — thank you for your hard work, for support, and for the right OS.
Click to expand...
Have you found an XMPP clien that works on FreeBSD and doesn't suck or have a smartphone ui?
 
"Is there a real interest in pushing FreeBSD on the desktop space?"
Why not?
But I got the point. Having so many good options out there why people want FreeBSD for a desktop?
I just wanted to get rid of M$ and the Penguin to try something else.
Freedom!
 
vulpine said:
Have you found an XMPP clien that works on FreeBSD and doesn't suck or have a smartphone ui?
Click to expand...
There was until some years no usable OCR Program, now there is tesseract.

FreeBSD is an Operating System, I think user programs for a Desktop are not of concern of the OS,
only device drivers are.
 
hruodr said:
FreeBSD is an Operating System, I think user programs for a Desktop are not of concern of the OS,
only device drivers are.
Click to expand...

Yes, but ...

First: User software (whether is is a daemon, a CLI-based program or a GUI-based program) needs an API from the operating system. About 20 years ago, that we pretty well organized and worked decently, using the POSIX standards for most generic programs. Where POSIX fell apart is at the edges (many were fixed later), such as threading and async IO. But today things are much more complicated than POSIX knows about. For example: You want to write software that is notified when a USB device is plugged in, and then performs system operations such as mounting file systems. Now you are outside the realm of POSIX, and things are typically quite OS specific.

Second: The graphics interface that is needed for a GUI is much more complex than normal device driver interfaces. And not terribly well standardized. And with Linux having a 99% market share among OSS operating systems with a GUI, the FreeBSD OS has to concern itself with staying compatible. In the day and age where Linux is slowly becoming synonymous with systemd, that is going to become more emotionally challenging for other OSes.
 
ralphbsz said:
First: User software (whether is is a daemon, a CLI-based program or a GUI-based program) needs an API from the operating system.
Click to expand...

ralphbsz said:
Second: The graphics interface that is needed for a GUI is much more complex than normal device driver interfaces. And not terribly well standardized.
Click to expand...
That is more a question about standards, and if Linux must become a standard.

If everything must be like Linux, is it not better to use the "original", Linux?

If FreeBSD becomes the standard, the OS that every other OS imitates, then all is solved.

But is that really what we want? A leading OS and imitations?
 
I don't think FreeBSD is a good solution for a personal desktop/laptop operating system. I am someone who uses FreeBSD on the desktop every day, for work and for personal projects. I'm not a Mac user, I was never satisfied with it's limitations. Everyone may have their opinions on Windows, but it's the ideal desktop OS.

It's not just FreeBSD that I think a bad solution, Linux sucks at it too. The problem is with the UNIX design philosophy. It's not meant to be 'desktop' friendly. Sure one could argue how Apple was able to make it "work", but look at how much "UNIX" they had to take away (or hide) in the process, and it's still not perfect.

100% of the time a person will buy a computer just for themselves. UNIX is designed to run on a computer that's going to be used by multiple people in an environment of zero trust. The end result is that almost 100% of the time, I the end user are being treated like an intruder on my own computer. Why should I have to enter a password to install new software? update, remove, change a system file, or edit system configuration? Why do I need to worry about file ownership and permissions? I don't even want to get into the shared libraries aspect of UNIX design, both Windows and Mac don't do it to the extent that UNIX/Linux does with end user software.

It's poor user experience for a single user desktop PC or laptop. Once I've signed into my system and proved who I am, I should be able to do everything (including breaking it) without having to 'switch users'.
 
tuaris said:
It's not just FreeBSD that I think a bad solution, Linux sucks at it too. The problem is with the UNIX design philosophy. It's not meant to be 'desktop' friendly.
Click to expand...
I actually tend to agree. Which means the industry is in a really bad position now because Microsoft is shovelling criminal stuff into Windows and there is no good migration strategy to any other viable OS.

What people will ultimately do is try to wrangle Linux for this use-case and it will be a horrible dirty mess of freeware. Desktop computing will arguably be worse than the previous decades.

I guess that as a use-case, desktop computing is overrated and dying anyway. For workstations, we have BSD.
 
kpedersen said:
What people will ultimately do is try to wrangle Linux for this use-case and it will be a horrible dirty mess of freeware. Desktop computing will arguably be worse than the previous decades.
Click to expand...
And all Microsoft et al need to do is keeping a ever so slight edge on that mess...
In those circumstances, I don't want to have any BSD advertised as Desktop OS, it will bring all the usual suspects to the table and we don't have the means to beat them back. Let them go for Linux, let Microsoft aim just a bit over the tip of the turdberg that is going to come out of that - we will then by default be above that. And then the question will be: Hide or Run?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top