Spreading FreeBSD

[Jose]

What a wonderful idea to make people angry. What would be the consequences? They’d popup here lamenting why does app X and app Y is not available and my gadget does not connect either?

This already happens anyway. Hardly a week goes by without some crackerjack coming in here to show me the error of my ways, and how Freebsd would be so much better if it only did X or Y like Linux does.

The last thing FreeBSD needs is a larger number of dissatisfied users, because the reputation of the “brand” would accelerate downhill.

I could not care less about Freebsd's "brand" or any other brand for that matter. Hype is worthless.

What FreeBSD needs badly is an increasing number of developers and port maintainers. What is actually being done to achieve this?

Being done by some others that should be doing this to suit the needs you perceive? What are you actually doing to achieve this?

Our community lacks people with knowledge and capabilities who are willing to contribute. What is the community actively doing to attract and educate those who could fill the gap?

I find this community to have a much higher ratio of highly knowledgeable and capable people than any other I've found on the Interwebz.

 

[PMc]

What ways would you all say would be good to spread the reach of FreeBSD to more users? More users could bring with it more developers and hardware manufacturers. This could mean better hardware support and more software aimed for the OS. Here are my thoughts:

That depends. What kind of users?

1. Friendlier atmosphere. I've noticed some of the developers and administrators tend to have a negative view and response to users. (You know who you are. ).

I can't confirm this. I prefer if there were any view. The problem more often is, no response at all.

2. Something like a settings screen. Even a terminal based one to start. Instead of having to go through configuration files or commands and reading man pages. Settings in one location. I know when I first started this took a lot of trial and error.
3. Faster boot times. I know waiting on dhclient has slowed my boot times down and attempting to switch it to run in the background doesn't always seem to work.

Ah, that kind of users. Well then, thanks but no, thanks. There was already some improvement for dhcp clients, and the effect of that "improvement" is that my server now takes almost half an hour to boot, because for each and every jail it starts, it has to wait for three network timeouts, because jails do not use dhcp (what for would they?) I certainly don't need more of that.

Probably there is a point where it gets difficult to improve the one without sacrificing the other. And what I need in the first place is a reliable server machine - from there I can always hack together something that will suit as a desktop. Apparently there are others here thinking similarly - and from there it gets understandable when the response is: just hack it together by yourself.

 

[PMc]

Make it more attractive to use as a desktop. Servers are fine, but I don't want one on my desk.

But that is exactly what FreeBSD is for: to have the versatility and engineering precision of a professional machine - even on a desktop.
If you run an all-terrain vehicle for your daily commute, it will also not work without a bit of configuration.

Above all, improve the auto-configuration to target hardware. When I install it on a box, I want it to "just work"(tm). I don't want to have to manually port it to my hardware.

I don't want a smartass OS that thinks it knows better what I need than I do.
Those who want that shall pay for it, then there are options.

BTW, thats a general rule: if you want to do something like common people do it, you have to pay for that. If you decide to do it like professionals do, you might even get paid for.
(I learned that when I figured that it is more fun to join in as a stage-hand than to visit the venue as a customer - but that was in the old days, lots of party, lots of drugs - might have changed nowadays)

 

[astyle]

If I have a phone/tablet to poke, why I should use that stone age device?

Tablets have been used by accountants since stone ages anyway ?

 

[ralphbsz]

My point is, people say they want FreeBSD to become more popular and used. You do that by giving people a reason to run FreeBSD.

I don't care whether FreeBSD is getting more popular or used. On the contrary, I think it getting more popular would actually make it worse; I'll explain why below.

I have a reason to run FreeBSD, which is: It is a very well-designed and clean server OS, which supports ZFS, the best file system amateurs can get for free. I don't run OpenBSD (which is even cleaner designed), because it lacks ZFS. I don't run Linux on my server, because it is too messy, and ZFS is a second-class citizen there.

This is one of many reasons why I think the committers (or the FreeBSD desktop team) should ship and maintain a stable desktop release.

The FreeBSD development "organization" (which is not one coherent organization, but a group of volunteers, with a little corporate and foundation support) is already too small. Adding the task of producing a well-curated desktop release would take effort away from the base OS, which benefits all users. And it's not just the desktop: To get a desktop machine, you need much more than a ready-to-install copy of Gnome or KDE. The moment you go into "desktop" usage patterns, you also start having to deal with laptop issues (like hibernate and sleep), power consumption, graphics drivers, WiFi rather than basic networking, uncommon USB devices, mounting removable media. These are all topics that can take inordinately large amounts of engineering time to deal with. At this stage, getting the base OS to be stable and smooth is much more important.

Obviously, if additional volunteers could be found, that would be wonderful. But don't throw away what FreeBSD has going for it, in the (probably over-optimistic) hope of changing the direction of the project.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I don't care whether FreeBSD is getting more popular or used. On the contrary, I think it getting more popular would actually make it worse

Yeah my " on the other hand" comment would have said the same as you

 

[Beastie7]

These are all topics that can take inordinately large amounts of engineering time to deal with. At this stage, getting the base OS to be stable and smooth is much more important.

The committers have already been focusing on low level desktop features for years, and I've yet to see any degradation of the base system in any metric or direction of the project. So this argument doesn't hold any water. Besides, there's a fine line between low level server and desktop functions; it's all either networking, storage, or compute (with graphics being the exception). The FreeBSD desktop team (committers and maintainers) are fair number of people iirc, and most of the userland components are in user space that'll never touch the kernel. I think your concerns are hyperbolic.
The issue here is giving the committers a reason to give up their macs for FreeBSD on the desktop; given the significant trade off in usage (and application/hardware support). They're not dogfooding FreeBSD on the desktop (nor are they using spins-offs, like GhostBSD); and me being a Mac user myself, I can understand why they aren't.

 

[cracauer@]

The issue here is giving the committers a reason to give up their macs for FreeBSD on the desktop; given the significant trade off in usage (and application/hardware support). They're not dogfooding FreeBSD on the desktop (nor are they using spins-offs, like GhostBSD); and me being a Mac user myself, I can understand why they aren't.

Macs are hard to beat. It isn't just about the desktop software and stable+fast wifi.

It's also the hardware. There is the only really usable trackpad, excellent screen, great speakers and with Apple Silicon the long battery life of course.

 

[astyle]

Macs are hard to beat. It isn't just about the desktop software and stable+fast wifi.

It's also the hardware. There is the only really usable trackpad, excellent screen, great speakers and with Apple Silicon the long battery life of course.

A ROG Zephyrus with a Ryzen 9, Radeon RX 6700 dGPU and 16 GB of RAM is $1649, while a MacBook Air with an M2 and 16 GB of RAM is $1900.... And both have a 1 TB SSD.

 

[zirias@]

It's also the hardware.

IMHO, if there's any advantage of Apple products, it's only the hardware. And then, you pay for that. A lot.

Judging the software is of course a subjective matter. I hated it every single time when I had to use MacOS for some reason.

As Wifi was mentioned once again, yes, that's still a pain point for FreeBSD, but OTOH works pretty well on Linux. The Apple approach of "strictly bundling" hard- and software removes a lot of complexity from these "hardware compatibility issues", so they can avoid this kind of problems...

The downside is, they also annoy opensource developers that don't happen to use Apple stuff anyways. To build something for MacOS, you need the platform SDK. The (only?!?) way to obtain it is installing Xcode. Which of course requires running MacOS. And doing so forces you to buy Apple hardware. At least for me, that's the point where I say: I don't care, if someone wants a MacOS build of my software, do it yourself.