Ugly Huge BSD Monster

[Randi Harper]

On Monday, September 1, 2003, at 10:45 PM, Brett Glass wrote:

> At 08:07 PM 9/1/2003, Randi Harper wrote:
>
>> My mom runs FreeBSD. ;)
>
> Good for her! So does my wife, who is an artist and not technical.
>
> But she runs text consoles THROUGH a Windows machine.

Ah. My mother actually runs a FreeBSD desktop. Personally, I have a 
FreeBSD 4.8 laptop, 2 servers running 5.1, and a windows box running 
exceed (no explorer.exe) that stream x apps over the network from my 
fbsd server. Windows gives me hives.

>
>> A desktop of it's own? Let's clarify something here. Having something 
>> like gnome or KDE doesn't qualify something as being a 'desktop' or 
>> not. Surely you can recall the days before gnome and KDE were 
>> popular. What did we use then? Window Maker? Enlightenment? KDE was 
>> somewhat popular, but it didn't have the momentum it has now. Yes, 
>> those are aimed at the Linux people. And for what it's worth, let 
>> them have it. gnome and KDE are the toilet paper of the stinky gas 
>> station bathroom that is X11, in my opinion.
>
> Yes, X11 is awkward and messy to build on. I do think that Apple's 
> approach,
> which scuttles X11 as a foundation for a UNIX GUI, is the right way to 
> go.
> (I have heard, however, that they will have a built-in X server in the 
> next
> version of OS X, so they will be able to interoperate with UNIX code 
> that
> relies on X11.)

Absolutely. I got my first look at OS X a few days ago when I got my 
new laptop, a PowerBook G4. I am loving it so far. I won't say it 
doesn't have it's problems, but it's gold when you compare it to the 
alternative. Clean, fast, and shiny.

>
>> GTK, an integral part of gnome, works fine in FreeBSD. Instead of 
>> people just sitting on their butts and whining 'I need a GUI, I need 
>> things to click on, I want something that does stuff for me so I can 
>> be a freaking moron but still be able to brag about my uname -a on 
>> IRC', wouldn't it make sense to code one?
>
> It'd be better to start with something that's not GPLed, so that one 
> was
> not planting yet another GPL poison pill within BSD. I and my 
> employees will
> not even look at GPLed source, due to the legal problems this can 
> cause a
> programmer who sometimes codes for money.

Ack, thinks for pointing that out. I hadn't even considered that. Damn. 
Well, can you think of a better toolkit to use for this purpose? Are 
there any decent ones that aren't GPL'ed?



Randi Harper

sektie at freebsdgirl.com
http://freebsdgirl.com