Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

On 4/1/2014 1:46 AM, 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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"?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?

I don't know much about BSD on the desktop, but it's somewhere I'd like to go eventually. This comment caught me off, however. The fact that there are thousands of flavors of Linux vs one flavor of a BSD desktop is sort of irrelivant--it could be applied, by that same method to BSD as a server. there are hundreds of Linux distributions that can be used as a server, so by your logic, "how do hundreds of Linux servers stand up to 3 flavors of BSD?"

I switched to BSD for a few reasons:
1) The documentation is amazing. As with any project, it can be improved as was mentioned in the most recent BSDNow, but the only other close call I can see is maybe Archlinux, and I don't want that on a server.
2) The ports and PKGNG system is beyond amazing.
3) The organization is more amazing. Everything is incredibly intuitive. I love the customization, flexability and organization of BSD.
4) I didn't care until rather recently, but anything that lets me rely less and less on GNU and the GPL is a bonus.

Given this, I commend everyone who has put hundreds of hours of work into making BSD a desktop system. Rather than suggest that BSD stays merely a server OS, why not pose these issues as problems or milestones. Perhaps sound has some drawbacks, but when the day arrives when it is up to par, I can almost guarantee if the BSD ideals remain the same that it'll be so much easier and cleaner to use than pulse/alsa, etc.



  Eitan Adler
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-- 
Take care,
Ty
http://tds-solutions.net
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.