Fwd: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

[Stefan Wendler]

Sorry,

should have replied to everybody ;)

Cheers
----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Date: Tuesday 01 April 2014, 17:34:28
From: Stefan Wendler <stefan.wendler at tngtech.com>
To: freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org

Hi,

On Monday 31 March 2014 22:46:45 Eitan Adler wrote:
> 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.
> 

I don't know the posts you are talking about. I'm using FreeBSD as a server 
since Version 7. Since FreeBSD 9 I'm also using it as main notebook OS. With 
everything you can imagine: sound, flash, 3D gfx, eve online via wine rocks, 
printing, scanning, you name it.

Yes, FreeBSD has some rough edges. But after over 18 years of Linux I can say, 
Linux has enough rough edges and depending on the current needs I more than 
freaked out once with each distro. And I still am freaking out on a daily 
basis as a *nix admin when one of the Linux's shows their true face. Like 
undocumented autoupgrading that messes up your whole ovirt-cluster. I never 
had that with a BSD.

But what there is to learn is, I only ever had problems with consumer/cheap 
hardware.
Most Linux Distros suck at least one way. For me the only Distro that really 
made me happy for over 14 years was Gentoo. In a way FreeBSD is similar but 
much much cleaner and sorted.

It may be that FreeBSD is not for you and you are more the Linux Mint/*buntu 
user. But it would be a nightmare for me, if the good FreeBSD folks would stop 
supporting X-stuff.  I even give to the FreeBSD Foundation on a monthly basis 
with the wish to further support the desktop.

FreeBSD is quite simple once you get the hang of it. But you have to be the 
person that likes to dig in sometimes. Currently it runs as smooth as butter 
here. When learning to use Gentoo for example I had not only one sleepless 
night where I had to fix broken libc upgrades without the ability to google 
that. But this is how we learn. With FreeBSD you have at least a running base 
system even if you mess up big time. Delete /usr/local/* but keep your 
/usr/local/etc and start over ... try that with Linux. No chance! I can go on 
here ;)

The big lag of FreeBSD is indeed vendor support. But it won't get better if we 
drop support for stuff. 

I'm sorry FreeBSD is such an upsetting experience for you. 

> 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?

... PCBSD stands out in that it is a really nice experience and people from 
the Linux world are asking about it and it just plain works mostly out of the 
box like a ubuntu or mint does, on hardware that is not no-name. And there is 
always GhostBSD (http://www.ghostbsd.org/) ... so there are two flavours 
already ;) 
The base system is still FreeBSD but I don't think that this is a problem. 
Ever fu**d around with getting the right packages in the right versions of 
some tools for example SuSE, CentOS, Debian, or whatever without freaking out? 
The different approaches in packaging systems on Linux is a mess as well. 

PCBSD is not for me though. But not that is isn't working but it is not for me 
as a BSD user as Ubuntu never was for me as a Linux/Gentoo user.

Linux is not the silver bullet. And in every Linux forum there are always 
people that complain about why Linux or this or that distro sucks and why they 
move on. And even Linux wouldn't be what it is without the various BSDs.

Cheers,
Stefan

P.S. One thing they could upgrade though is the linuxulator.

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