RE: Leaving the Desktop Market

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eitan Adler [mailto:lists_at_eitanadler.com]
> Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 10:47 PM
> To: hackers_at_freebsd.org; current_at_freebsd.org; freebsd-
> advocacy_at_freebsd.org
> Subject: Leaving the Desktop Market
> 
> 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?
> 

Eitan,

While I understand your frustration, VICOR is using FreeBSD as a Desktop since
FreeBSD 2.2. We don't use sound and we are fine relying on vesa.

While I understand that the things you listed are actual short-comings for normal
Desktop users,  I think it's the wrong decision to say that we should be backing
out *any* functionality that would make the Desktop any more difficult to
produce.

As it stands, it would take me weeks just to count the number of workstations
that are running a GUI, rely on one of the existing video drivers (nv, radeon,
mach64, etc.) and use lots of Desktop ports.
-- 
Devin

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