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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" ?
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?
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?
the problem now is to get groups like GNOME and KDE to use the features we're making available to them.
The obvious problem for large projects like GNOME is of course that they need to make a good experience on a pretty wide variety of platforms. To use any platform-specific feature it will need to be either emulated, replicated, worked around or otherwise made available on all platforms; or it could only go in as an optional extra that nothing else is actually depending on. So, making advanced FS logging capabilities a cornerstone of the desktop, for example, would be out since far from all platforms will have the requisite framework. "You can only run desktop X if you also use filesystem Y" is likely to go over like a lead balloon.
Fortunately, good ideas in the OS space tends to be picked up by everybody sooner or later. Over time there just aren't that many good ideas that will not be available everywhere as time goes on.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
Can we please have a car analogy?
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
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?