Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Zhihao Yuan]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Lorenzo Cogotti <miciamail at hotmail.it> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering about the possibility of FreeBSD to provide an official
> supported graphical environment.
>
> Currently FreeBSD doesn't provide any standard desktop environment, this
> means that, in a way much similar to Linux, a developer cannot know in
> advance which GUI will be available on the system. This leads to another
> problem, again much similar to Linux, tools are usually provided in a
> text based fashion only, because that's the only sure and reliable way a
> tool can work in a relatively dependency free and independent way. As
> another effect, many utilities and graphical tools are provided for a
> toolkit, but not for another, needlessly duplicating efforts and
> applications, achieving barely half the result.
>
> Though, in a different way than Linux, FreeBSD doesn't get much support
> from developers in this regard, mainly because development focuses over
> Linux rather than FreeBSD, which remains known only as a good and
> reliable server platform, many technologies remain relatively unknown
> and doesn't get attention from developers, like devd vs udev, and other
> solutions that FreeBSD provides since a very long time.
>
> The idea would be choosing a default desktop environment and providing
> it as the official supported way to develop GUI applications on FreeBSD,
> thus tools provided on FreeBSD would be able to get official GUIs and
> supported graphical tools in a standard and non-redundant fashion, like
> a GUI for tools like pkgng, geli(8), gpart(8). This choice would also be
> motivated by the fact that often technologies move toward Linux support,
> like GNOME3, dbus and consolekit, without taking into account BSD.
>
> In this regard CDE[1] is could be an interesting choice, since it was a
> diffuse and reliable UNIX environment, and it is lightweight, relatively
> Linux-like dependencies free solution, which could be updated to today
> standards and extended to support FreeBSD features.
> CDE was just recently released with open source license[2] and some
> effort is being made to support FreeBSD.
>
> Of course CDE isn't the only possibility, the idea is "desktop
> environment agnostic", also I don't mean that FreeBSD shouldn't work
> with other environments, which could still be installed and used as long
> as they support the platform properly. I don't mean forcing a graphical
> environment over installed FreeBSD systems either, which could be
> unwanted for server installations.
>
> [1] http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/
> [2]
> https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/978aff3dc9c7d009423a3d7fd0624d12f9df0734/tree/cde/COPYING?format=raw
>
> I see this as an interesting opportunity to let FreeBSD gain more
> visibility in the desktop field, would this idea be useful and worth
> implementing?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Lorenzo Cogotti
>
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I definitely agree with this. Sun has a book, "UNIX Essentials
featuring the Solaris...", and GUI takes a big part in the book. A
default GUI is essential to a modern UNIX. FreeBSD can no longer
regard GUI as a third-party bonus.

-- 
Zhihao Yuan, nickname lichray
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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