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Lumina: PC-BSD's Own Desktop Environment
jones_supa (887896) writes "The PC-BSD project is developing a new open source (BSD license) desktop environment from scratch. The name of the project is Lumina and it will be based around the Qt toolkit. The ultimate goal is to replace KDE as the default desktop of PC-BSD. Lumina aims to be lightweight, stable, fast-running, and FreeDesktop.org/XDG compliant. Most of the Lumina work is being done by PC-BSD's Ken Moore. Even though Lumina is still in its early stages, it can be built and run successfully, and an alpha version can already be obtained from PC-BSD's ports/package repositories."
I'm not even going to link to the xkcd comic, we all know it.
Besides, one of the awesome things about open source is anyone can attempt to build a better mousetrap for any reason they damn please. Yes it leads to fragmentation and a lot of duplicate effort, but it also leads to people trying out new ideas and having fun. This guy wants to make yet another window manager, all the power to him. Maybe it'll be awesome. Maybe it'll have some clever thing that gets used elsewhere. Maybe he'll get bored in a month or so. It's his time to waste regardless.
When being asked, why re-invent the wheel, the best reply is because just maybe the wheel isn't good enough.
I can think of numerous times where people tore everything down and started over and found some flaws in designs that wouldn't have been seen otherwise.
Place something witty here
Okay, but when you've torn everything down and started over from scratch twenty-plus times already, maybe that stops being the right development methodology?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The summary contains several mistakes.
1. Lumina is not yet available in the ports tree, searches for it do not return anything.
2. The project is not trying to become the PC-BSD desktop, at least not yet. Right now it is in the early/experimental stages to see if making a PC-BSD only desktop is feasible.
3. There is no default desktop on PC-BSD. KDE is one of the install-time options, which include MATE, LXDE, Cinnamon and many others.
http://razor-qt.org/
The problem with xfce, gnome, and most of the other desktop environments is that they tend to focus on Linux and most of them have actually removed *BSD compatibility recently in favor of the latest trends in the Linux community.
XFCE famously dropped FreeBSD support for some functions in their file manager for example. Gnome told us to FSCK off entirely.
We have to fight back.
What does "development methodology" have to do with it? Sometimes you just want to start from scratch rather than hauling along someone else's baggage. I guess your complaint just falls into the category of "dissatisfaction with how others spend their own time."
This is relivant:
http://blog.martin-graesslin.c...
I can't add much to Martin's sage words, but basically the term doesn't have much meaning in and of itself. Its the tech equivilent of stamping a "Natural" label on a box. What does that mean? Almost anything.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Maybe it'll be awesome.
No, it won't be awesome.
But what are they going to change that will make the effort worth it? When I look at the variety of desktops, the majority (perhaps all) of them seem to be tinkering with the same basic concept. It would be much more interesting if this splitting was leading to a drastically different desktop concepts, but it's not.
You realise that when Linux came about, there had already been more than twenty UNIX derivatives, right?
We got tiling WMs.
I'm not a fan of them, but it's kinda different.
My goal will be to make it heavyweight, unstable, slow-running, and compliant with nothing!
I cringe how much that sounds like Unity. ;)
Probably: BSD license and guaranteed support for BSD unixes. The former occasionally matters to the people working on the BSDs, the latter definitely does. (And is notably lacking in many of the current desktop environments - even if they do work on BSDs, they are often missing features and poorly maintained, with no interest in providing better support.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The flip side of that is the old adage "divide and conquer", the OSS community is almost self-defeating at times. Long before the mouse trap is the kind of smooth experience users want the core developers have moved to their new and even more grand mouse trap refactoring/redesign/remake that'll fix all the fundamental issues they discovered in the last design. Not that it's really different from proprietary software, at work it's exactly the same I'd love to get rid of the old and in with the new because even though it's not entirely done yet it's so much better than the old. The difference is at work I can't just drop working on our existing software and with our current user base, what pays the bills is what they get done not what I feel like doing. With OSS the train is leaving the station quite often, either you're on it or you're on your own.
And by on your own, I mean good luck finding a backport of any modern software to run on a distro 5+ years old or figuring out all the dependencies yourself. Just upgrade, it's free as in beer and in speech... but not as in time. Almost every 6 month cycle when I was on Ubuntu there was something I wanted and a bunch of unwelcome changes that tagged along. With Windows 7 I feel pretty confident that I can install any 2014 application on my 2009 OS, it'll work and it'll involve just that application. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's somebody out there who wants the new version but as long as it's not broken for me, don't fix it. I just wanted a new app, not a new distro.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well excuse me! I merely read the fucking summary and somehow thought just because it said that "the ultimate goal is to replace KDE as the default desktop of PC-BSD" and that "Lumina aims to be lightweight, stable, fast-running, and FreeDesktop.org/XDG compliant," that meant the point was to make something better for the public, not merely to "have fun" or "learn" something.
Clearly, your reading comprehension skills are so far beyond mine that you were able to determine the "real" ultimate goal of the project despite the summary explicitly saying something completely different. I'm so goddamn sorry I deigned to participate in the conversation, when my ideas so pale in comparison to your obvious brilliance!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Has anybody actually tried to take the KDE and trim the rarely used and niche functions?
Yep, in fact one such effort was started by some KDE devs:
https://blogs.kde.org/2013/04/...