Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

Hi all,

I have been a member of the FreeBSD hackers mailing list for about a year.5
now and I must say that I was looking forward to this year's 4/1 email.
Last year, I didn't even realize that the discussion of promoting i386 as a
tier 1 architecture was a joke until someone blatantly mentioned in...

To address the actual content of this thread, personally, I absolutely love
the FreeBSD os and the community that supports it. However, even as a third
year computer engineering student, I still have not overcome the overhead
that comes with becoming familiar with the UNIX environment. Of course,
that is mostly attributed to my laziness and my unwillingness to sit
through an entire reading of documentation...

To share an observation, I am a teaching assistant for a freshman C
programming class and I recently set up three FreeBSD servers, one for each
section, where students could learn to develop C programs in an actual UNIX
environment. Here is the lecture that I wrote up to help them learn the
basics: http://vecr.ece.villanova.edu/bk/fc/labs/docs/ece1620-l2unix.pdf. I
led the first section yesterday and I have to say that it was an utter
disaster. Only about 1/8th of the class showed even an ounce of interest in
this stuff (as it was something extra and not required for the course) and
I really f'ed up by trying to teach them how to use vi...

Long live the BSD community!


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Andreas Nilsson <andrnils_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org mailing list
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "
> freebsd-current-unsubscribe_at_freebsd.org"
> >
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-hackers_at_freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe_at_freebsd.org"
>



-- 
Best Wishes,
Brian Kim