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

grahamperrin said:
ericbsd below, should your About text broaden, to include NomadBSD?

github.com

GitHub - ghostbsd/networkmgr: NetworkMgr is a Python GTK3 network manager for FreeBSD, GhostBSD, TrueOS and DragonFlyBSD

NetworkMgr is a Python GTK3 network manager for FreeBSD, GhostBSD, TrueOS and DragonFlyBSD - ghostbsd/networkmgr
github.com github.com



github.com

Replace wifimgr by networkmgr · nomadbsd/NomadBSD@13e8647

Livesystem based on FreeBSD. Contribute to nomadbsd/NomadBSD development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

net-mgmt/networkmgr

ericbsd also maybe <https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-...6ee636d25ca94/net-mgmt/networkmgr/Makefile#L6>.
Click to expand...
Does NomadBSD use it?
 
grahamperrin said:
It's a fine concept.

Not rocket science, however realisation would be far from trivial.
Click to expand...

It's funny. The detractors always seem to think that providing a desktop ISO would somehow eliminate their freedom of choice for a desktop experience. A headless release would still be provided. That excuse is far too tired.

smithi said:
I suggest reading the two articles I've posted links to, recently above, and links Graham posted re FreeBSD governance to gain a much clearer picture of how that has worked and now works, before assuming Core collectively to be less cluey than your good self.
Click to expand...

I've demonstrated my understanding of the projects governance on numerous occasions. My account is fairly old. The fact that some of the committers have highlighted the same issues I've mentioned on previous summits and conference makes my arguments far less tenuous. I suggest you should actually watch conferences, summits, and what they have to say instead of projecting ignorance.

zirias@ said:
I can only conclude you're not a developer.
Click to expand...

Nor is it a prerequisite to discuss such matters. You can keep your head in the sand though spewing gibberish.
 
kpedersen said:
Install the drivers along with their horrid spam.
Click to expand...
Uhh... I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding. Lenovo provides downloads for Windows drivers for their built-in hardware, like wifi cards. Same story with vast majority of laptop brands, including HP. Those drivers don't have bloatware. All you have to do is go to the driver downloads page for your specific laptop model. OEM drivers will be there, no bloat or nannying or driver packs. A random example I've linked to: (And yes, this one does have an Intel wifi card)

Granted, sometimes a scanner driver will have some unnecessary bloatware. Sometimes, printer drivers come with that same annoying stuff.

Yeah, under Windows, you sometimes have to pay attention and say no to the annoying extras offered up by the installer.

Yeah, it would be nice if hardware drivers were as simple as no-name USB keyboards and mice that work so nicely under FreeBSD.
 
FBSD is just what it claims to be. Apple was the anti-IBM. There is no debate on it. I use Freebsd but not to post here.
 
Last edited:
Rock said:
FBSD is just what it claims to be. Apple was the antiWindow. There is no debate on it. I use Freebsd but not to post here.
Click to expand...

I'll use anything to post here - FreeBSD, Windows, Mac, Linux, KataOS, you name it... even if I have to use goose feathers and squid ink 😤
 
astyle said:
Uhh... I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding. Lenovo provides downloads for Windows drivers for their built-in hardware, like wifi cards. Same story with vast majority of laptop brands, including HP. Those drivers don't have bloatware.
Click to expand...
Lenovo and HP are better but their drivers still come with installer .exe's that put random cruft in the registry.

Plus, if you open up the drivers and have a look around, there is a fair amount of bloat. The Lenovo trackpoint driver for example, comes with random services, control panel extensions, etc. If you do a driver extract, it shaves all that off.

Obviously the Nvidia and AMD drivers contain a little more random bloat.
 
ralphbsz said:
...my Mac doesn't even have "xcode" (the compiler/library collection installed), as I found that it just wastes disk space and forces me to upgrade something I don't actually use...
Click to expand...
Really? Not even the command-line tools Homebrew needs? You install 5,000 versions of Python and keep up with the 10,000 versions of the AWS cli manually? (I kid, I kid.)
 
kpedersen said:
Lenovo and HP are better but their drivers still come with installer .exe's that put random cruft in the registry.

Plus, if you open up the drivers and have a look around, there is a fair amount of bloat. The Lenovo trackpoint driver for example, comes with random services, control panel extensions, etc. If you do a driver extract, it shaves all that off.

Obviously the Nvidia and AMD drivers contain a little more random bloat.
Click to expand...
Considering the size of the SSDs laptops originally come with these days, I don't think that storage is as much of a concern as it used to be. Besides, it's kind of nice to have options - you can do things from command line or Control Panel. (😏 Remember Larry Wall's quote that there's usually more than one way to do it? 😏 ) Plus, the trackpad driver is nowhere near as annoying as it used to be. Yeah, sometimes you have pretty big updates that you can't do anything about, and they come in at bad times. But at least system component drivers don't harass you to update some birthday card composition utility, and if you pay attention, you can turn the auto-update off. Attention (and connecting the dots) is required in both UNIX and non-UNIX camps.

In UNIX, the big headache is security patches - if you don't apply them correctly (with flags, and other options), they can break a LOT of things due to dependency hell.

BTW, even Larry Wall says that there shouldn't be more than 10 ways to do the same thing...
 
astyle said:
Considering the size of the SSDs laptops originally come with these days, I don't think that storage is as much of a concern as it used to be.
Click to expand...
Weirdly it isn't about the size. More the mess. I would prefer a solution that takes 10x more disk space but has a clean implementation, rather than a bunch of ratty files scattered about.

If you strip the junk, it still integrates with the GUI control panel and the command line just fine. The junk really is just pointless.

The "correct" way to do it is apparently use DISM to add the OEM drivers to the Windows image. But so few vendors support "enterprise" driver deployment in the Windows world. Its all heavy consumer stuff. With that, I suppose, you get mess.
 
Is there a real interest in pushing FreeBSD on the desktop space?
Click to expand...

Is it important?

For whom? For an OS to 'survive'? To become famous? TWD and 'beat' another?

Just install any OS you like, that installs on your box, or just the one you can grab. Tweak it when possible to your needs and wishes -- make a server or desktop out of it.

In the end we'll see which OS is popular for what reasons.

Apart from that, FreeBSD is the base for some great out-of-the-box installations -- NomadBSD, GhostBSD, helloSystem. How nice is that!
 
Last edited:
kpedersen said:
The "correct" way to do it is apparently use DISM to add the OEM drivers to the Windows image. But so few vendors support "enterprise" driver deployment in the Windows world. Its all heavy consumer stuff. With that, I suppose, you get mess.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, but that assessment runs counter to what I'm doing in real life on my $JOB - and yes, it does involve hardware drivers and Enterprise Windowsimages. And no, there's no such thing as 'enterprise hardware driver'. Enterprise Office 365 (and other softwares like Java or SAP) licenses, yes. Enterprise Hardware drivers - no such animal. Just add the hardware driver to the image that you're deploying, and that's it. The driver doesn't care if it's inside an enterprise image or not. To top it off, Windows Update does include hardware drivers for both enterprise-grade and consumer devices.

Even the 'heavy consumer stuff' has backed off bundling too many extras with the installer. These days, it's a 'Free extra download' available from manufacturer web site. I know that HP did back off that nonsense.
 
It is clear which one is popular. The reason is not so clear. I think is because people remain in fear of leaving the main stream. The 'go with the flow' rule.
 
astyle said:
I'm sorry, but that assessment runs counter to what I'm doing in real life on my $JOB - and yes, it does involve hardware drivers and Enterprise Windowsimages.
Click to expand...
I think the deployment type is called SCCM. Its strange, the Windows guys who maintain the clients at work specifically use this tool:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...cing-command-line-options-s14?view=windows-11

And will use things like this:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/solutions/client-management-solutions/drivers-pack.html
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Enterp...ing-ThinkPad-Driver-Packs-for-SCCM/m-p/800691

As I mentioned above, traditionally no-one provided the drivers public in this "inf" form in an "all in one" pack, so instead some enterprise agreement has to be set up for access. For example, there is no SCCM driver pack for the X220i ThinkPad. I specifically recall them getting annoyed by that.
 
Rock said:
It is clear which one is popular. The reason is not so clear. I think is because people remain in fear of leaving the main stream. The 'go with the flow' rule.
Click to expand...
The strange human behaviour of wanting to 'personalize', 'customize', wanting (!) 'options' for cars and hamburgers,
but using just the OS and software that was there and what others use, 'having no idea at all' of possibilities.

SheepOS
 
Beastie7 said:
It's funny. The detractors always seem to think that providing a desktop ISO would somehow eliminate their freedom of choice for a desktop experience. A headless release would still be provided. That excuse is far too tired.
Click to expand...
It is your opinion. But it will not be trivial for a desktop version because no one will agree on one desktop. I have experience with this. GhostBSD is suffering from trying to be one DE; the XFCE only exists because someone makes it work in the community. I have often been asked for a Gnome3 and KDE version of GhostBSD, and my answer is always the same: if you want it, make it happen.

I will say the same to you if you want it. Make it happen.

GhostBSD has Mate because it is the only UI I liked for a long time. I have been stuck on the Gnome 2 UI since it existed, and I am not interested in any other DE. I just shared what I liked with people worldwide, and some liked it. To me, it is like the Mac UI. It did not change for a long time and only improved with time. That is the direction Gnome should have gone, but they did not.

Beastie7 said:
Nor is it a prerequisite to discuss such matters. You can keep your head in the sand though spewing gibberish.
Click to expand...
No, but it helps to understand the complexity of what it takes to make it happen. When I first started on my journey of creating GhostBSD, I didn't know what I did not don't know. Now I know, but sometimes I forget how difficult it is to implement everything people want.

It has been a long journey with GhostBSD. I started at the point where I only knew how to install games and open a browser on Windows. I started to be curious about installing many Linux distributions; I discovered FreeBSD, and installing Gnome2 was painful initially, but only because of the language barrier. I was forcing myself to do everything in English. I liked FreeBSD more than Linux, but I liked how Ubuntu was at that time and started to create a livecd. Then I created a Python text-based installer with pc-sysinstall and after a GTK UI installer called gbi(GTK BSD installer), NetworkMgr, and so on. I started doing this with no programming skills or knowledge.

Today, I have a better picture of what needs to be accomplished.

My solution for all of you who want that is:
  • Make a forum post to discuss how it should look.
  • Start to work on it.
  • When a final product is done, introduce it to the community.
This is how it should be.

The pkgng tool started out of the FreeBSD and is now in FreeBSD.
 
ericbsd said:
My solution for all of you who want that is:
  • Make a forum post to discuss how it should look.
  • Start to work on it.
  • When a final product is done, introduce it to the community.
This is how it should be.
Click to expand...
Agreed. This is the only reasonable solution.

And I still feel that with some organisation, it could be quite a fun thing. It relates back to a potential idea a while back:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/adapting-a-games-jam.75479/

Lets turn it into a remote hackathon. Many of us here dabble in software, artwork, documentation, sysadmin, etc so we certainly aren't lacking the skills. (Companies sponsoring University hackathons is one thing, a worldwide community of nerds is another!)
 
meine said:
The strange human behaviour of wanting to 'personalize', 'customize', wanting (!) 'options' for cars and hamburgers,
but using just the OS and software that was there and what others use, 'having no idea at all' of possibilities.

SheepOS
Click to expand...
It is human nature to like what others like. Behaviour is learned.
 
kpedersen said:
I think the deployment type is called SCCM. Its strange, the Windows guys who maintain the clients at work specifically use this tool:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...cing-command-line-options-s14?view=windows-11

And will use things like this:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/solutions/client-management-solutions/drivers-pack.html
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Enterp...ing-ThinkPad-Driver-Packs-for-SCCM/m-p/800691

As I mentioned above, traditionally no-one provided the drivers public in this "inf" form in an "all in one" pack, so instead some enterprise agreement has to be set up for access. For example, there is no SCCM driver pack for the X220i ThinkPad. I specifically recall them getting annoyed by that.
Click to expand...
Yeah, paying attention and being able to do research is something you gotta be able to do even in the Windows camp... Even then, the Windows camp does make a clean distinction between what makes sense in an enterprise market vs what makes sense in a consumer market.

In the Windows camp, you can find the correct drivers for your hardware - if you know how to look. Sometimes you run into 'driver packs'. Sometimes, a driver is packaged in a way that is annoying to the end user.

Even if there's no 'SCCM Driver Pack' for a specific laptop model, there's still an OEM page dedicated to that model where the public can go and download the drivers individually.

It's just a matter of either being aware of what the alternatives are, or being willing to do a bit of research to figure it out. And that rings true for both UNIX and Windows camps.
 
astyle said:
It's just a matter of either being aware of what the alternatives are, or being willing to do a bit of research to figure it out. And that rings true for both UNIX and Windows camps.
Click to expand...
Very true.

In some ways I find that whilst Windows has far more documentation (the MSDN/TechNet/etc is impressive at how much info is on there) than most Linux/BSD projects, I actually find it quite a lot of work to sift through it all and find *the* solution.

Obviously the benefit of Windows vs i.e Linux is that *a* solution will generally keep working for a while, whether it is current best practice or not.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top