Re: Using a FreeBSD desktop was somehting about dog food

On 3/27/22 16:28, Jerry Seibert wrote:

> "Publish or perish " is an aphorism describing the pressure to publish
> academic work to succeed in an academic career. A parallel can be drawn
> between that analogy and the need for software and operating system
> developers to innovate or wither on the vine. At the very least, they
> need to stay competitive, which means they must keep current.
>
> FreeBSD never innovates and rarely stays even remotely current. They
> are consistently behind other operating systems regarding innovation
> and staying current with modern devices, i.e., the  555-BEOY:
> Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Network and IO Card. {See:
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=237666}
>
> FreeBSD may be fine for commercial use in servers, but it is falling
> seriously behind in the consumer market. The public, in general, is not
> interested in using an OS that fails to run their favorite or
> industry-standard software. Nor are they relishing the opportunity to
> be held hostage to a system that will not accommodate modern hardware
> devices. Even an ordinary, everyday item such as a printer driver can
> be an exercise in futility with FreeBSD. Getting a current driver with
> full printer support is difficult at best in way too many instances. I
> contacted Brother USA a few years ago inquiring about a driver for a
> high-end laser printer I had purchased. They had drivers for several
> *nix products, but none for FreeBSD. The engineer I spoke to ran Linux
> on his home PC and fully felt my pain. He explained that FreeBSD was
> just not mature enough to invest the money and time required to produce
> a full line of drivers.
>
> As I see it, FreeBSD will be relegated to the back of the pack for home
> use. I do not know a single business, at least a fortune 500, or any
> municipality that uses FreeBSD for their office PCs. If FreeBSD wants
> to stay relevant in the home market, they need to up their game and
> stop putting out a new version simply to put out a new version and
> rather invest the time and effort required to correct the existing bugs
> in FreeBSD and create drivers for newer devices.

For me, I don't believe FreeBSD needs to compete for the consumer space. 
It's okay to focus on what you are good at, and leave the rest for the 
others that do that space better.

Mark.