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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[Anrego]

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.

Re:Why?

[nucrash]

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.

Several mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Several mistakes

[jones_supa]

Submitter here. I take full responsibility for the mistakes you mentioned. Most of that stuff I simply robotically extracted upstream from the Phoronix article. I did not use more of my time to do a verified, accurate research of the topic. My apologies.

Anyone knows how it would compare to razor-qt ?

[biloute]

http://razor-qt.org/

Had to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why?

[Microlith]

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."

Re:Why?

[adri]

You realise that when Linux came about, there had already been more than twenty UNIX derivatives, right?

Re:Why?

[Anrego]

We got tiling WMs.

I'm not a fan of them, but it's kinda different.

Re:Why?

[Daniel_Staal]

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.)