flowtable usable or not

[Ian Lepore]

On Sat, 2012-03-03 at 03:44 -0300, H wrote:
> Doug Barton wrote:
> > Just looking at the committers, of which we have over 300, only a
> > couple dozen at most have ever identified as actually using FreeBSD as
> > a desktop at my count. Taking the larger development community into
> > account I think the numbers are a little better, but not much. Sure,
> > our strength is servers, and that is not going to change. 
> eventually that could be a good starting point, good question is, why not?
> 
> > But how many real-life bugs have I personally uncovered in -current as
> > a result of actually running it (mostly) daily? I'm not the only one,
> > certainly, but if the numbers were flipped and the vast majority of
> > our developers *did* use FreeBSD routinely, how much better off would
> > we be? 
> again, why?
> 
> let's face some reality. Forever installing FreeBSD Desktop, either KDE
> or Gnome, was a nightmare process, or better, to make it appear on
> screen was a nightmare.
> 
> Even if somebody got all packages into his system (by miracle?), it
> still did not popped up. Without some special knowledge _no_chance_.
> 
> who knows, the guys who created and battled on area51 knew why they
> chose this name :)
> 
> Still now, kde4, hours of install, missing packages, compiling and still
> nothing, somewhere over the process, flies over the screen please set
> kdm4_enable="YES"  ... I guess that will not be noticed by any user
> 
> Even if some smart guy figures out that he needs xorg-server, the port
> or package do not select all it needs for running, its own drivers and
> so. How a user should know that? There is a windeco which installs
> hundreds of deps, even sound what do not work on FreeBSD, but xorg do
> not have deps for its functionality? goooood ... ohhh I forgot, that has
> nothing to do with the desktop itself , sorry for mentioning ...
> 
> Anybody can tell how somebody can find all this out? Don't say by
> reading because we need to look at the real facts and that is nobody
> want to read, they want a desktop nothing else, something silly and easy
> to read email and write docs and surf on the net, listen to a CD, they
> need to put a cd into the drive, running install process, reboot, using,
> nothing else and such a thing ... we do not have
> 
> so where this potential users should come from? Only from heaven ...
> > And before anyone bothers to point it out, yes, I happen to be using
> > Windows at this exact moment. I have some layer 9 work to get done and
> > I need tools that are only available to me in Windows (more's the
> > pity). The sad thing is, judging by the activity on the -ports@ list,
> > the traffic in #bsdports, and just talking to/interacting with FreeBSD
> > users, a lot of *them* are not only interested in FreeBSD as a desktop
> > OS, they are actually doing it.
> 
> IMO the weakest point is that we do not have the packages ready.
> 
> Even if lots of you do not like it to hear, fact is that we must look
> around and see how others do it. Windows, whatever it is, it is easy to
> install for everybody.
> 
> Same for Fedora, in order to stay with a Unix system, package handling,
> update with YUM on Fedora hardly fails.
> 
> ALL packages are compiled, you never need to compile anything. Even if
> you need 800MB of packages, yum picks them all, installs them all, and
> all is fine up top date. Such a process is where we need to get
> orientation from.
> 
> If it was my decision, it should be go to ports=no_no, packages=YES
> 
> I mean, as long as the packages are not complete and ready, no new port
> version should be released or announced
> 
> So who dares,understand and can or like adventures, compiles from ports
> 
> Such a decision would help FreeBSD in all means and would help the users
> as well, in any case it will create more users
> 
> Why somebody should chose FreeBSD as his daily desktop, oh man, only
> some die-hard-guys like you and me, but you know, that is not hours of
> work, that is days, weeks and constant setbacks for whatever reasons ...
> that is not for anybody. And you are right, no traffic on the specific
> lists, why? because the three on the list, two can help themselves (you
> and me) and the other is the moderator ... :) not even the port
> maintainer/packager is on that list ...  :)
> 
> ps. the last statement might be exaggerated and might not be valid in
> all cases, so please do not shoot
> 
> 

When the announcement of the 8.3-BETA1 release was made on these lists I
had just finished building a new machine to become my everyday desktop
machine for code development.  I figured I should download and install
using the new beta to help test the release.  I was disappointed to find
that the packages weren't on the beta dvd ISO, so the test wasn't as
complete as I was hoping in terms of being similar to what a new user
would experience.

I ran through the sysinstall process without any glitches and rebooted
to a working text-mode system.  Then I did, from my notes:

        pkg_add -r for the following:
           sudo
           rsync
           xorg-server
           xorg-drivers
           gnome2
           nautilus-open-terminal
           firefox
           libreoffice
           emacs
           subversion
           mercurial

There wasn't a single hitch during any of that.  I did eventually
discover that I had to enable the snd_hda driver to eliminate spewage of
warning messages in the log from pulseaudio.  This is annoying, but I
had exactly the same problem with Fedora a couple years ago when I was
using it as a desktop (it's okay to assume that most desktop users want
better sound than a 1982-style beep; it's rude to require it).

Assuming that the usual packages will be on the final release image, I'd
have to say that anyone can successfully install and configure FreeBSD
as a desktop machine without being a power user.  It all just works, at
least for 8.3.  That hasn't always been the case in the past, and if you
need to update a specific component or two after initial install I think
it is likely to be way harder in FreeBSD with ports and packages than it
is in a distro such as Fedora that uses yum.

So turning brand new virgin hardware into a usable desktop system for
everyday code development using a recent release from a mature branch
took a couple hours (mostly package download time) and a handful of
commands.  On a non-beta release I think the time would have been much
shorter, and the commands would have been reduced to checking a few
boxes in the package browser part of sysinstall.

I'm not sure whether it would go so well on 9.0, but it isn't yet a
mature branch -- IMO, if you want to live on the leading edge you should
expect to do a bit more work.  I would expect that by time 9.1 comes out
the process should be about as smooth as it was for 8.3.

-- Ian