Re: Why don't you eat your own dog food?

On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 02:19:07 +0100 (CET)
iio7@tutanota.com wrote:

> I don't think I have ever seen anyone from the FreeBSD project
> giving a presentation, or doing a live stream, or a YouTube video,
> or anything else in which you can see the persons computer
> screen, in which he or she runs FreeBSD as the desktop
> operating system. Either it's Mac OS or Windows.

	A few things spring to mind,

	"FreeBSD, the power to serve", FreeBSD is primarily developed as a
server OS - nobody knows this better than the developers who make it
happen. For example the best supported ARM systems are high powered data
centre server systems not the Raspberry Pi.

	Many of the key people in the project have employers who make
FreeBSD part of their job and so they use company resources to prepare
presentations - and company desktops are always Windows or Mac.

	Some people prefer the commercially developed UIs to open source
ones - personally I think the Windows UI is a dog's dinner but the Mac UI is
better than any open source UI (flwm comes second IMHO and is what I use on
my own kit) - but that's just my personal opinion and I'm often considered
odd. I've occasionally thought about closing the gap - but the amount of
work involved in even the smallest step is daunting and I have other things
that need doing.

	Developing something like the Mac or Windows UI is a *huge* project
stuffed full of boring tedious work that it's really hard to get volunteers
interested in let alone committed to and it needs really good directional
leadership - also difficult to achieve in an open source project where
major differences of opinion usually lead to forks which thin out the
developer pool. As for organising the kind of user experience testing that
goes on in commercial UI development and using the results - I can't see it
happening when there isn't budget control to trump ego. It is not surprising
there is nothing in the open source world with the polish of commercial UIs.

	The FreeBSD project does not develop any kind of desktop UI (they
wouldn't have time for anything else and that's not what they're
interested in). FreeBSD can run KDE or Gnome based desktops well enough but
they're not part of FreeBSD. The FreeBSD project does not develop any kind
of presentation software, FreeBSD can run OpenOffice, LibreOffice, AbiWord
and even some of DWB but they're not part of FreeBSD. These are not dog
food to a FreeBSD developer - indeed there's nothing with a GUI that is.

	Look to what the developers use for NAS, network services,
databases, web servers, routers, build farms, hypervisors ... There you will
find dog food being guzzled enthusiastically. Way back when FreeBSD started
it was supported by Walnut Creek and ran their ftp.cdrom.com archive/mirror
site (the busiest ftp server in the world for some time saturating a fast
ethernet with four 90MHz Xeons and a *lot* of SCSI drives) - the project
has *always* eaten its own dog food and loved it.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org>