Leaving the Desktop Market

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 02.04.14 04:26, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> It's no longer "xorg just speaks to the graphics chip."

This is a common trend in computing recently. What once required tightly 
integrated OS/applications is now distributed, in the widest sense. The 
so called "Personal Computer" is nowadays actually spread out all around 
the globe -- some of your "desktop" applications or parts of them might 
actually run in a data center far, far away. Having lots of diskless 
workstations in my office, all running FreeBSD and fact being "dumb" X 
Windows terminals to a bunch of servers, where the actually applications 
run -- it is sometimes very difficult to even begin explaining this 
concept to colleagues who have seen nothing but the Windows PC. The 
display, keyboard, mouse etc might be running their own and different OS 
each.

Therefore, I don't see this adding of abstraction layers as a bad thing, 
as it lets you have a "FreeBSD workstation", running on an Android STB 
as the interface to your physical monitor/mouse/etc. What we should do 
instead is make sure that FreeBSD supports the respective APIs.

Considering that today visualization is everywhere, I also don't see any 
problem running that particular Windows, or Linux "only" application in 
an VirtualBox window. Or (in my example office case), running something 
(Linux?) on the diskless workstations that handles the peculiarities of 
the particular video chip/audio etc and still providing you with the 
same desktop session on your FreeBSD servers.

Daniel