Leaving the Desktop Market

[Chris H]

> Hi all,
>
> Some of you may have seen my posts entitled "Story of a Laptop User"
> and "Story of a Desktop User".  For those of you who did not, it can
> be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a
> desktop.  In short, it is an educational experience.  While FreeBSD
> can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default
> and often doesn't work as well as we would expect.

Ha, ha, ha. Reminds me of the long running 04-01 gag stating that
kernel.org ran on FreeBSD.

As to "Leaving the Desktop Market";
+1. OK by me.

OTOH The following /will/ give you everything you /claim/ isn't
/currently/ possible.

x11/xorg-minimal
x11-wm/xfce4
audio/aquqlung
multimedia/vlc

The above list also gives you the ability to switch output(s) on
the fly (via mixer).

"exotic" video card?

emulators/linux_base-f10
x11/nvidia-driver

--Chris

P.S. Happy April fools to you, too.

>
> The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past:
>
> Battery life sucks:  it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running.  Windows
> can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it
> two hours.  I wonder what the key differences are?  Likely it’s that
> we focus so much on performance that no one considers power.  ChromeOS
> can run for 12 hours on some hardware;  why can't we make FreeBSD run
> for 16?
>
> Sound configuration lacks key documentation:  how can I automatically
> change between headphones and external speakers?   You can't even do
> that in middle of a song at all!  Trust me that you never want to be
> staring at an HDA pin configuration.  I'll bet you couldn't even get
> sound streaming to other machines working if you tried.
>
> FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported.  Dropbox hasn't
> released a client for FreeBSD.  Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on
> FreeBSD.  Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with
> the caveat: "but you won't be able to use your graphics card"?
>
> In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera
> only works because of the linuxulator.  There really isn't any reason
> for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape
> Linux anyways.
>
> That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the
> desktop market.  FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be "year of the Linux
> desktop" and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for
> server or embedded use.
>
> Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I
> must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the
> Linux world?
>
> Eitan Adler
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