Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Matt Olander <matt_at_ixsystems.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard <jkh_at_mail.turbofuzz.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler <lists_at_eitanadler.com> wrote:
> >
> >> 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?
> >
> > The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if
> it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or
> Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April
> fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would
> simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-)
> >
> > I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the
> fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the
> fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail
> Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu.
> >
> > There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux.  There
> never has been and there never will be.   Why do you think we chose "the
> power to serve" as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan?  It makes a fine
> server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room.  It's also
> becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another
> excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments
> there.
> >
> > A desktop?  Unless you consider Mac OS X to be "BSD on the desktop" (and
> while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to
> say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following
> reasons:
>
> As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's
> 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game.
>
> This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant
> car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look
> at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of
> nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing
> pretty well.
>
> I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete
> in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc.
>
> In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k
> visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and
> clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me!
>

Seeing this I could not resist:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/which-operating-system


>
> Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P
>
Let them prosper!

Seriously, though. There are shortcomings, sure. But I tend to prefer the
rock solid feature rich base with a somewhat  shaky desktop experience than
the other alternatives.

Sure I would like to see a FreeBSD pulseaudio compatible sound server. And
perhaps a template library for pinout configs for snd-cards. And "native"
flash, although I say "flash, no thank you"

Perhaps companies such as Netflix could release FreeBSD clients ahead of
linux clients ;)

I can also say that I recently got a friend to migrate from linux on both
his home server as well as his laptop. He is very happy with the change.

Cheers
Andreas



> Cheers,
> -matt
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