Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

Hice April 1st piece,

Let's see what I could contribute :)


On 01.04.14 08:46, Eitan Adler wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some of you may have seen my posts entitled "Story of a Laptop User"
> and "Story of a Desktop User".  For those of you who did not, it can
> be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a
> desktop.  In short, it is an educational experience.  While FreeBSD
> can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default
> and often doesn't work as well as we would expect.

There is no platform that can do everything as you please. In fact, 
there can't be any such thing with computers, because they are not 
humans and only do what we humans instruct (program) them to do, not 
what we believe we programmed them to do. A slight difference, but 
important to see things in perspective.

>
> The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past:
>
> Battery life sucks:  it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running.  Windows
> can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it
> two hours.  I wonder what the key differences are?  Likely it’s that
> we focus so much on performance that no one considers power.  ChromeOS
> can run for 12 hours on some hardware;  why can't we make FreeBSD run
> for 16?


Who said we can't? We did, do and will do that. On a case by case 
solution. This is strictly hardware specific issue and of course, no 
other OS can claim good power management on "any" hardware.

> Sound configuration lacks key documentation:  how can I automatically
> change between headphones and external speakers?   You can't even do
> that in middle of a song at all!  Trust me that you never want to be
> staring at an HDA pin configuration.  I'll bet you couldn't even get
> sound streaming to other machines working if you tried.

Lack of documentation has always been the "weak" part of any enthusiast 
work. For people care more about getting the work done, than writing 
long essays. I would not go that far to say you can't switch audio 
outputs in a middle of a song (or why not, a movie?). After all, this is 
strictly hardware specific issue and of course, no other OS can claim 
good audio management on "any" hardware.

> FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported.  Dropbox hasn't
> released a client for FreeBSD.  Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on
> FreeBSD.  Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with
> the caveat: "but you won't be able to use your graphics card"?

Purchasing specialized hardware (a laptop), without being aware what 
software will drive it is always a very bad idea. As for those vendor's 
proprietary technologies, they don't function on many other modern 
platforms, not only FreeBSD. Then, there is choice -- you could use 
other vendor's technologies, if that suits you. Or, if (say) CUDA 
requires OS XYZ, use that instead of FreeBSD.  Not that this has 
anything to do with "desktop".


>
> In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera
> only works because of the linuxulator.  There really isn't any reason
> for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape
> Linux anyways.

If you will remember, most of this is because of different licensing 
restrictions imposed by those vendors. I am absolutely confident, Adobe 
will produce a very good Flash Player for FreeBSD, once you convince 
them there is money in that.

>
> That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the
> desktop market.  FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be "year of the Linux
> desktop" and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for
> server or embedded use.

FreeBSD is not sold. There is no such thing as "market" for FreeBSD. 
Neither in Desktop, Server or whatever other arbitrary "segments". In 
fact, FreeBSD is not even a product -- it is more of a toolkit, which 
you use to build your very own OS for your very own "segment".

Yes, 2014 might very well turn out to be the year of Linux, but that is 
not because of FreeBSD -- Microsoft are helping much more with their 
insistence to kill Windows XP.


>
> Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I
> must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the
> Linux world?
>

You mean, all those short lived species will arrive in hordes and 
destroy the Dragon? Might be, might be not. The dragon has seen 
thousands of those already come and go.

Having fun is most important in the process. :)

Daniel