Leaving the Desktop Market

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 06:40:18PM -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> Hmmm.  I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the
> desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD.  It's still my
> primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which
> drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few

There are a few alternatives to Lightroom available in Ports Collection,
you might want to give them a try one day.

> remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash).

That's easy: Flash sites should be avoided.  Most of them are using this
technology for showing stupid ads anyway, not for something useful.  I
still recall a friend of mine actually *loved* that his iPhone does not
support Flash: it essentially enabled (ad|spam)-free Web browsing (alas,
those fuckers had caught up since then).

> But let's be clear that different people have different requirements
> for a "desktop".  My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm,
> XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE,
> gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and
> Firefox for "promiscuous-mode browsing").  [...]
> 
> Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK.  But
> let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good
> now (and has actually gotten substantially better).

Application availability does not, unfortunately, round up some perfect
desktop.  I fear that Linux-centric development of hardware drivers, X.org
and all that shit is getting more and more divergent from FreeBSD, and
soon enough we'll get the situation I haven't seen for some 15 years: we
are again far behind on modern HW support.

Power-saving techniques, most notably working sleep-resume and competitive
batter life are also our weak points at the moment.  I'd like to replace
my old laptop (which runs 8.4-STABLE almost perfectly), but how far can I
go with, say, recent MacBook Pro?

./danfe