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FreeBSD Vows to Compete with Desktop Linux
AlanS2002 writes "FreeBSD developer Scott Long is being reported as saying that FreeBSD is quickly approaching feature parity with Linux. Apparently this is being achieved through efforts to more tightly integrate GNOME with FreeBSD, with one of the priorities being to 'GNOME's hardware abstraction layer--which handles hardware-specific code--working with FreeBSD'."
Wasnt the goal of BSD to be secure and reliable, like debian, only moreso? How come now they're "competing with desktop Linux" ?
To head off some confusion: This isn't about the FreeBSD base system; it's about third party code (like GNOME and KDE) in the FreeBSD ports tree. The FreeBSD base system already has feature parity with Linux (ok, there are a few things Linux has which we don't, but there are also things we have and Linux doesn't) -- the problem now is to get groups like GNOME and KDE to use the features we're making available to them.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I don't know what Linux distributions you've been using recently but I have recently installed Fedora Core 5 on my laptop and my experience was the opposite: that they must have been primarily focused on important features for desktop users. FC5 supported suspend and resuming my laptop, where FC4 didn't. FC5 supported my Centrino wireless with autodetection and configuration for both open access and WEP and WPA PSK protected networks right from the GNOME Desktop. FC5 automatically detected my USB-attached smart UPS on my desktop at work and can report the remaining run-time. It was the least-hassle desktop Linux install I've done yet.
As far as software installation, I don't use it but you can go to Applications->Add/Remove software and graphically browse thousands of software packages that are a click and a download away from being installed.
Compete with DESKTOP Linux? Shouldn't they aim a little higher, compete with OS/2???
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
I don't think FreeBSD devs care who's using OSX. They are not the same even if they do use similar kernels.
Can you point out the study or survey which shows that most Linux devs spend their time on useless eye-candy? Because I don't think that is the case.
If by beating Linux to the market you understand having the code taken by a company, and not seeing anything really valuable back in return, then yeah, you can praise OSX as much as you want.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
In ports. KDE have been tightly integrated with FreeBSD for years.
They aren't using similar kernels: Darwin uses XNU, a hybrid kernel. Many of the things running on higher levels are shared by both, though.
In 1908, the Ford company released the Ford Model T. The first Model Ts were built at the Piquette Manufacturing Plant. The company moved production to the much larger Highland Park Plant to keep up with the demand for the Model T, and by 1913 had developed all of the basic techniques of the assembly line and mass production. Ford introduced the world's first moving assembly line that year, which reduced chassis assembly time from 12½ hours in October to 2 hours, 40 minutes. However these innovations were not popular and turnover of workers was very high. Turnover meant delays and extra costs of training, and use of slow workers. In January 1914 solved the problem by doubling pay to $5 a day, cutting shifts from nine hours to an eight hour day, and instituting hiring practices that identified the best workers. Productivity soared and employee turnover plunged, as the cost per vehicle plummeted. Ford cut prices again and again and invented the system of franchised dealers who were loyal to his brand name.
By the end of 1913, Ford was producing 50% of all cars in the United States, and by 1918 half of all cars in the country were Model T's. Henry Ford is reported to have said that "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." This was because black paint was quickest to dry; earlier models had been available in a variety of colors. But most were black."
What the Model T was to the automobile DOS/Windows is to computer software. People faced with new technology that manages to takeoff tend to choice a brand that they gravitate toward in order to provide them with a base from which a general learning curve can be traced. As with the Model T, once a general concensus is arrived at as to what the new technology can do for the masses then competing models come into play and bells and whistles are taken in hand after the basics have been learnt. The computer industry has achieved a saturation level and the basics have been put in place. Now there is a chance for more competition. It's likely that Linux on the desktop is coming soon.
That freeBSD has chosen to announce its competition with Linux is more supplemental support to show that the basics of the desktop have been put in place. Competition between Linux and freeBSD is great and will foster competition between F/OSS alternatives that will soon provide greater incentive for the general computer population to move from Windows to alternatives.
I suspect the initial gauge of this movement will be a greater market share taken by Apple.
Just my loose change
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Windows eats Linux and poops FreeBSD
I am confused - are you trying to depict Windows as a gourmet or rather as an entity with a magic colon?
from personal experience i have to say i am biased towards GNU/Linux with Slackware being my favorite, i recently tryed both DesktopBSD & PC-BSD on my first primary partition, they were both decent KDE desktops and i was familier with CUPS so setting up my printer was not a problem, but with GNU/Linux when i tried ubuntu breezy it made setting up a GNU/Linux desktop a total "no brainer" (including printer, scanner & digital camera) that should help non-techies setup a GNU/Linux desktop a lot easier, the two BSD desktop flavors (DesktopBSD & PC-BSD) stand a good chance to give the GNU/Linux desktop camp some competition which is a good thing :)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
There are separate teams working on KDE and GNOME integration. It just so happens that the interview was conducted with a GNOME on FreeBSD developer, so the focus was on GNOME. Be assured that FreeBSD's KDE integration is very good and will be even further improved on in the future. DesktopBSD, for example, features KDE as the default desktop.
Also, KDE is officially a cross-platform environment, with KDE4 being developed not only on Linux and FreeBSD but also on MS Windows. I don't know what the officiall position is for GNOME, but from what I hear they are a pretty Linux-centric project.
Ack. When is this rumor going to die?
OS X, back when it was called NEXTSTEP, forked off of BSD 8 years before FreeBSD did, even before 4.4lite came on the scene. You can trace its lineage yourself, if you'd like. Since then, there's been a lot of code borrowing but everyone borrows from FreeBSD and FreeBSD is far from the only OS whose code Darwin has borrowed. Using just that to say that Darwin is based on FreeBSD would make little more sense than using the same fact to claim that GNU/Linux and Windows XP are based on FreeBSD.
But as to your point about BSD in general beating Linux to the desktop with OS X, yeah, you're right. I think Apple showed how it really needs to be done, too. In my experience with trying to teach people to use Linux, the thing that consistently hurts Linux on the desktop is what I'd call its unixyness - stuff like complicated directory hierarchies based on abbreviated names only serves to intimidate the non-geek; even if you tell them they don't need to care about anything outside their home directory, they still know it's there. A lot of Linux's celebrated choices are bad; too. The moment a user ever has to care about QT vs GTK+ and figure out why they are behaving a bit differently, or what the heck CUPS is, or any of that, Linux starts to feel like a border town on the edge of the Wild.
He is exactly right! Consistently, users choose KDE...
I would love to see that backed up with some actual facts? I'd say the users are pretty evenly divided (this is definitely what I see at work).
Linux will always be ahead on cutting edge hardware because of the nature of the licences.
History shows that the 'always' part in there is seriously wrong..
BSD gets a driver, linux will have in after a quick port.
Linux gets a driver, BSD has to wait and re-impliment.
That is how it seems to a person who has absolutely no idea about kernels and drivers and the different BSD distributions.
First, there are quite a few BSD variations all with their own set of rules for integrating drivers, where some see no problem in using gpl code, others see no problem in using closed source drivers in cases, and yet others swear that everything must be free and open.
Second, differences between a BSD style kernel and the linux kernel are substantial enough that a 'quick port' is seldom an option for technical reasons alone.
Can we please have a car analogy?
I use FreeBSD on a daily basis, I have FreeBSD servers, a FreeBSD development machine, and a FreeBSD daily use desktop (irc, email, web browsing, im, etc.) As it stands now yes, FreeBSD has both the newest versions of KDE and Gnome, and as far as I know the newest version of all the bigger window managers. However, as it stands now FreeBSD is not really a viable desktop in the same way that Linux is. This is because of the two major 3rd party softwares, neither of which are open source. Flash on FreeBSD is rather a joke, which is not to say that the people who work on the flash ports aren't doing well, but going to any flash site is a gamble. Pandora and Google Video, both sites that I go to regularly, lock up Firefox completely. And then there's Java. Java is marked restricted in the ports because of licensing issues, is non-redistributable (hope I spelled that right). Java is a real pain in the arse on FreeBSD. In my experience, the chances of a successful build are about 50/50 at best. You have to download several larger files and move them into the distfiles directory, start the build and cross your fingers and wait.. many hours.. There are other problems as well, for FreeBSD as a desktop os like Linux, but these are the major two... everybody expects to be able to browse the web on a desktop OS with little to no trouble. And as it stands now FreeBSD is unable to deliver an easy to use, out-of-the-box solution for desktop use. I hope this doesn't start a flame war, just adding my two cents.
OS X, back when it was called NEXTSTEP, forked off of BSD 8 years before FreeBSD did, even before 4.4lite came on the scene. You can trace its lineage yourself, if you'd like. Since then, there's been a lot of code borrowing but everyone borrows from FreeBSD and FreeBSD is far from the only OS whose code Darwin has borrowed. Using just that to say that Darwin is based on FreeBSD would make little more sense than using the same fact to claim that GNU/Linux and Windows XP are based on FreeBSD.
Referenced from the site you mention yourself is the BSD family tree.
If you had bothered to look at it, you'd have noticed that:
Darwin is based on Rhapsody, NetBSD 1.4 and FreeBSD 3.2
OS X 10.2 imported code from FreeBSD 4.4
OS X 10.3 imported code from FreeBSD 5.1
If you had ever bothered to use a FreeBSD 5.x machine for a while, and used a machine with OS X for a while from the shell, you'd have noticed how the userland is virtually identical, to a level way beyond how some linux distributions are similar..
Where OS X really did not derive from FreeBSD at all is at the kernel level and of course the gui.
I realize this article is about the ports tree, but FreeBSD's main source *has* been moving at a blistering rate of development the past few years. Recently there was an article about linux 2.6 getting buggier - and unfortunately the same is true of FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x ... Some things to consider:
* 6.x came out shockingly fast after 5.x
* 4.x was orphaned correspondingly quickly (despite being arguably the only stable freebsd branch left)
* vinum (software raid) support, among other things, was broken thanks to the introduction of geom around 5.1, and gvinum is finally beginning to approach stability as of 6.1
* The new scheduler, ULE, was introduced in one 5.x release and then abandoned when it proved to be completely unstable.
* As a reaction, one of the lead developers forked dragonflybsd off of the last truly stable freebsd release, the 4.x branch. Others have just given up.
* Bugfixes are getting left on the floor in favor of adding features ( just look at a relatively old release such as freebsd 5.3's TODO list: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html - note that most of these problems are *still* not fixed in 6.1 )
People choose the BSD's for stability - or at least, they used to. FreeBSD has been going down a features at all cost route in some kind of effort to play catchup with their perceived rival linux for some time. In doing so, it is losing what makes it unique, and it needs to stop, or else people will abandon FreeBSD for other BSDs, linux (which is now more stable IMO), and even mac os.
-DH
They don't behave differently. At least, the differences are no worse than on the Mac or Windows where apps frequently reinvent the standard toolkit (*cough*Aperture).
or what the heck CUPS is
The only time a Linux user would have to care about this is if their printer isn't supported. And most are (albiet with varying degrees of driver quality).
12 Dec 2005 - Linus Torvalds states that "only idiots will use [Gnome]".
20 Apr 2006 - Linus claims "that [...] FreeBSD [People] are incompetent idiots."
12 May 2006 - The FreeBSD folks announce a tightly integratin of GNOME with FreeBSD.*
* You didn't click that link, did you?
Thanks to ALSA Linux can be used in recording studios nowadays.
Name a studio using Linux in any meaningful way for audio recording.
"Sufferin' succotash."
KSE was not implemented to design
When I first proposed KSE, my proposal was that all system calls become asynchronous - you dispatch the system call. Then, if you wanted POSIX semantics, you suspended yourself until the result was available.
The intent was to implement all of the POSIX blocking semantics at the Libc layer, and all the operational semantics at the kernel layer, and to permit any number of dispatches to occur concurrently.
The way you implement multithreading in this environment is to use call-conversion scheduling: you trade a normally blocking system call for a non-blocking system call plus a context switch. This basically gets you multithreading for free.
The intent of this approach is to utilize your full process quantum, rather than giving it away and suffering an unnecessary context switch overhead, while you still had work pending that could be done in user space within the same process.
In one posting, I put it like this: "If a kernel gives me a quantum, it's *my* damn quantum, and I'll use as much of it as I can, and if I can't use any more,*then* I will yield to a voluntary context switch".
The way you obtain SMP scalability (which was *NOT* the original reason threads were invented in the first place, BTW, since they predated commercially viable SMP system by a long ways) is by permitting multiple processors to return to user space on completed async system calls.
Intelligent readers will not that by not giving away the quantum you were given, you basically get a form of CPU affinity thrown in for free, without any modification to the kernel scheduler, up to the point where you would context switch to a process other than yourself, and cache-bust/TLB-shootdown anyway. This was not a bad idea.
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What happened instead was an implementation of SA (Scheduler Activations). They kept the KSE name. I came up with it initially - "Kernel Schedulable Entitites" - because I didn't want people to be thinking about solving the problems we intended to solve in a way that was constrained by the ideas that would carry over from using words like "activations" or "threads" or whatever. Semantic loading constrains free thought on technical issues a heck of a lot more than people give it credit for.
But SAs fell far short of my intended vision for the original implementation, a vision I could not implement on my own without buy in from the rest of the FreeBSD community.
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Once we got buy-in that we were going to do *something* in this area, we had a big meeting. It was hosted at Whistle Communications, where Julian and I and others worked, and where we tended to host BAFUG meetings. Jason Evans and others attended.
I was unfortunately unable to sell my async call gate approach to the problem ("too many changes"), and a compromise was worked on scheduler activations, and a user space thread scheduler that would cooperate with the kernel scheduler.
Compared to what we ended up with, the changes required for the async call gates would have been a lot less code. But I fully admit: my suggested approach would have been impossible to implement incrementally - it would have been all or nothing, and stepping over that threshold would have cost a lot. I failed to sell it adequately, and can only fault myself.
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Realize that this was not a bad compromise, given the technology at the time: context switches were murder, and crossing the user/kernel protection domain was a heck of a lot more expensive than it is on todays hardware. Also, the vast majority of SMP Intel boxes available in 1996/1997 were at best 2 processor boxes (I still have my dual P90 ASUS box).
Later, the expense of scheduler activations became plain, but it was still not too bad, until things like TLS - "Thread Local Storage" - and other POSIX semantics changes started to make things more painful.
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Meanwhile, FreeBSD got thread reentrancy work done in its kernel, and a separation of address spaces and contexts, that it would have needed to have, no matter what threading approach was used. So KSE's, even implements as the were, instead of how I had originally envisioned them, was well worth it.
-- Terry