Re: boot banner project

On Apr 29, 14:51, John Sconiers wrote:
> Do you want to get / keep new users, compete wth other operating
> systems, etc....
> 

This question touches on why this discussion is so important.

Let's not forget that FreeBSD tends to be used by folk who are more
computer literate and for serious computing purposes.  These folk
want the detail and completeness of what we currently have.

Let's also not forget that this discussion is taking place in
freebsd-current, so the folk here are the most dedicated of these
serious computer people.  It's to be expected that many folk here
don't want a graphical boot banner, and they view it as bloat.

But when we talk of attracting new users, and especically new desktop
users, we need to consider the not-so-savvy computer user who is
probably better off not seeing things like boot messages at all.
Consider the millions of M$ users who are happy when the boot
sequence is just a graphic screen.  For them, the hood is closed
and they don't see what goes on inside.  If the FreeBSD community
is interested in making the fruits of all its great development
work available to the wider world, we need to be able to close the
hood, too.

But, as was stated long ago in this thread, that's what splash(4)
does.  For non-computer-savvy end-users, a system configured with
splash(4) and a cool image is all that's needed.  At the same time,
for the more advanced user, things can stay as they are now.

And, yes there are side benefits to a cool image display.  It's not
seen only once.  It's seen every time the system is booted.  How
often have you been in a meeting or sat on a 'plane and seen the
Windows screen on the next passenger's laptop?  Putting a cool
FreeBSD logo there for a minute or so during the boot would be a
great way of advertizing FreeBSD.  I.e., read this comment to suggest
that we need an installation option for end-users that enables
splash(4) with a cool FreeBSD logo -- this installation would be
separate, of course, from the standard installation for computer-savvy
folk.

Personally, I am not sure there's a whole lot of benefit to an
in-between option of semi-verbose or tidier messages.  But if there's
demand for this and you want to do it, go for it.

There are, however, some additional gaps in FreeBSD that frustrate
potential new end-users.  We need to address these in order to offer
a more complete system that competes with other desktop systems.
Some things that come to mind:

	- graphical installer (with partitioner, dual boot
		stuff, and ports installation ability)
	- GUI-based package manager, with support for
		vendor-provided packages
	- decent Java installation (sorry, but what we have
		now is a joke)
	- up-to-date Flash support
	- video/webcam support
	- improvements to the plug-and-play support for
	  printers, scanners and a few other common devices

This list of gaps is not a long list.  While some of these issues
might need real work to address, we are in sight of a much more
complete system.  Discussions have taken place on this and other
freebsd lists about some of these, but it's not clear if work is
progressing.

We should discuss packaging a distribution of FreeBSD aimed at
attracting more new users.  We'll need to add these (and other)
missing features and we may need to close the hood over things like
boot messages.  Yes, it's time that we do compete with those other
operating systems and we should attract more of their users.

	-jr