Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

In article <533B3903.7030307_at_rancid.berkeley.edu>,
michael_at_rancid.berkeley.edu writes:

>I have been using FreeBSD on the desktop since 1997,

Hmmm.  I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the
desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD.  It's still my
primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which
drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few
remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash).

But let's be clear that different people have different requirements
for a "desktop".  My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm,
XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE,
gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and
Firefox for "promiscuous-mode browsing").  Once in a while, I even
need to run a remote X application over an SSH tunnel.  A Web server
(Apache) and a mail server with local delivery and spam filtering
(sendmail+spamass-milter+crm114) round out the requirements.  I do not
ever need or even want translucent windows, Zeroconf, 3-D games, or
nonlinear video editing.  Audio playback only matters to the extent
that it's smooth and the settings stick.  I write documents and code;
my desktop is a productivity tool, not a gaming platform, and it
performs that function quite well, thank you very much.

Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK.  But
let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good
now (and has actually gotten substantially better).

-GAWollman