Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

On 1 April 2014 15:40, Garrett Wollman <wollman_at_hergotha.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> 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).

The problem (among many) is that you don't have those requirements but
the Xorg desktop developers and the graphics driver / layer developers
have those requirements and they're sure sticking to them.

So, you're going to end up getting 3D/hardware accelerated graphics
and crazy audio integration requirements for your web browsers soon,
which drag in libdri_<chipset>.so and all of the bugs that keep
popping up with that. It's no longer "xorg just speaks to the graphics
chip."


-a