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PC-BSD: Set For Serious Growth?
Artem Tashkinov writes: Luke Wolf, a KDE developer, argues that PC-BSD might become a serious desktop OS contender by year 2020, since Linux so far has failed to grasp any serious market share. He writes, "Consider this: In the past 10 years has the distribution you run changed significantly in what it offers over other distributions? I think you'll find the answer is largely no. I do have to give a shout out to openSUSE for the OBS, but otherwise I've used my desktop in the same exact way that I have always used it within the continuity of distribution X,Y, or Z since I started using them. Distributions simply aren't focused on desktop features, they're leaving it up to the DEs to do so." He continues, "PC-BSD on the other hand in fitting with the BSD mindset of holistic solutions is focused on developing desktop features and is moving rapidly to implement them." What do you think?
Well, that clinches it for me. 2020 is *definitely* the year of the Linux desktop.
I'll have my stuff ready for it.
-- Lennart Poettering
Stay away from tablet ui cr@p, semantic desktop shÂt, systemd...
The war was fought decades ago, a winner was declared and for some reason the Unix/Linux neckbeards still sit around railing about how they'll take that hill someday..
The desktop is increasingly unimportant, or mostly an adjunct to where people do their primary computing which is portables. Give up on the desktop and accept that you have a niche, hold onto that niche and nurture it instead of constantly beating your heads against the desktop, it's not going to happen. Even Apple kind of half-asses their desktops now and focuses on their phones, and they have a development budget bigger than some countries.
Make KDE into a full OS. Fork Kubuntu, tell all other distributions that KDE will provide them access to the sources and patches, but KDE intends to become a full competing desktop and tablet OS. Ubuntu vs Mint vs Fedora makes no sense to the casual users I know. If I could hand them a copy of KDE and say "run this" that would improve things tremendously.
My distro is not jumping on the systemD bandwagon for the next year at least; and they have two far superior alternatives to that GNOME rubbish.
Looking at it's Desktop environment (lumina), there is no way in hell PC-BSD will ever become widely adopted. It's a jarring shitfest of Windows-95 wanna-be hell designed by amateurs. If any OSS *nix has a shot at becoming mainstream by 2020, that would be Ubuntu. While they have their own issues, at least they understand how to put together a good looking UI, and their installer works quite well on consumer grade gear unlike most OSS *nix distros.
It would require a radical shift among BSD developers and the companies that sponsor them to make any serious inroad into the desktop. AFAIK, there are almost no BSD developers contributing to DE's like KDE or Gnome.
This is probably because the focus for BSD's are servers; their sponsors pay for making server software that may be close sourced. All the major DE's are using GPL toolkits, so BSD developers are unlikely to make any contributions besides the minimal required work to make the DE's work on BSD.
In case that eg. Wayland support don't materialize on BSD, then I find it much more likely that DE's like KDE and Gnome will split their code, leaving it up to BSD developers to maintain whatever they need to make those DE's run, in the same way OpenBSD does with OpenSSH.
If the article is right, 2020 will still not be the year of the linux desktop. Instead it would be the year of the BSD desktop.
Bit of a difference.
"Consider this: In the past 10 years has the distribution you run changed significantly in what it offers over other distributions? I think you'll find the answer is largely no."
Unfortunately, the answer is yes, and in a negative way. Distros got better for a while, but then they maxed out around 2001, and it's been a gradual decline ever since. Luke may have the best of intentions, but his solution is no solution.
Frederick Brooks had it right - there are no silver bullets.
You have a computer prediction (and a software one at that) that is attempting to look 5 years into the future. Yeah, good luck with that. Any article talking about the future in such a way is simply a marketing ploy. Nothing more. Nothing less.
A reasonable road map demonstrating how this could possibly be achieved on the other hand would have some credibility.
Compared to this article, the Mars folks look a little less crazy.
You seemed to have missed the anti-systemd rant article and thought this was one by mistake. Here's the link to the article you want: Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System.
Like the systemd argument itself, most of the world has moved on.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
.
On a lark, I happened to install FreeBSD with KDE. It worked just as well as any of the GNU/Linux distributions. I wanted to look at PC-BSD, but my test notebook is 32-bit only, So I'll have to save that test for another day.
So now I'm wondering, since everything I need to do is available so long as I am able to run KDE, why does the underlying OS matter at all?
Linux failed to catch on at the desktop because of too many distros creating confusion and lack of standardization, and not enough device support from vendors etc.
How will PC-BSD change those issues?
Table-ized A.I.
Systemd doesn't even have a stable feature set yet, and yet you say the world has moved on? Maybe you are on a different world?
It also has a bug list that is huge, and the number of critical bugs embarrassing.
...if something other than OS X or Windows managed to make its way on to mainstream desktops. Despite all the improvements, it still seems to be a half-assed solution to a largely solved problem.
It's more usable than it used to be, but still nowhere near where it needs to be.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I came to this conclusion back in the year 1999 or so, when I saw the emergence of two major GUI systems for Linux, Gnome and KDE. Since then, the Linux desktop was an always changing hydra consisting of numerous GUIs, fast changing APIs, etc. Linux distributions fill pretty nice the nice of a power desktop user's OS. The kinds you run into academia, engineering, etc. But I don't see how it could become a mainstream OS. The only way for Linux distro to become mainstream is to have some kind of benevolent dictator in the form of a large company (like google) to create a working GUI and make all hardware vendors to ship it (e.g. Android).
This. The interface is what defines the OS from a desktop user standpoint. Not only does it define ways of doing things, but also defines a great deal of UI driven software packages that a desktop user needs.
Say what you will about Stallman and his GPL, but one thing's for sure is that it's hostile to this type of siphoning off of users over to the new shiny thing marketed by large preexisting corporations.
Users wouldn't be siphoned off if GPL'd software wasn't a dull attempt at copying other software. RMS is all bummed about Clang/LLVM being more innovative and not being encumbered by his restrictive license, he's against the export of the AST from gcc in case a gcc user wants to use that output as input to a non-copyleft compiler backend, he sees non-copyleft open source software as an "attack" on free software, he's just getting more bitter that "free software" isn't what people want. People want "good software" and if that happens to also be "free software" then that is purely by coincidence, but "good software" is the primary concern so if there is no cohesive effort toward that then inevitably the GCC will be abandoned (by most) in favor of Clang/LLVM and Linux will be abandoned (by most) in favor of BSD.
In the early days the gcc succeeded because it was a good, free-of-charge, open source compiler that also happened to be copyleft. Now a better, free-of-charge, open source, non-copyleft compiler has come along in the form of Clang/LLVM showing that copyleft is not a defining characteristic for most peoples' choices. Even Linux is not about free software, it simply leverages copyleft for Linus' ideological view of "tit-for-tat" contribution, hence the reason he doesn't care about Tivoization, in fact he sees Tivoization as a good thing because it's more people contributing code!
The first thing you need to insure is that there is a MBR compatibility mode for your motherboard, which for your machine should be IPISB-CU (Carmel2), so this is possible. Once you have that, you can probably figure the rest out in the wiki, or better to ask in the forums. I could give you some help but maybe slashdot is not the place for that. I hang out often in #freebsd so you might catch me there, and in general there are many helpful people there.
You will notice that I put the links for FreeBSD for the PC-BSD. The only real difference between the two is the software repositories. In fact you can easily convert a standard FreeBSD to PC-BSD simply by changing a few configs. You might try that route if you want a quick desktop install. I prefer to 'roll my own' but the PC-BSD guys have really done a lot of good work putting in good defaults.
Sorry that link was eaten by slashdot. Here is a shortened one: http://goo.gl/VsOSS7
Will it run my databases and dev tools? If not, it's a user environment and I could care less about that.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That's utterly ridiculous. There's a lot more to an OS than just the desktop environment (DE): there's the kernel, the init system and other low-level daemons, the display subsystem, the package manager, and of course lots of apps (beyond just what KDE (or Gnome) include in their software collections). The KDE team has enough work to do, they certainly don't want to become their own distro, when there's already several distros that feature KDE as a prominent DE (Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE for starters).
About 4 years ago. I now use a Mint install at work and a mint install at home. So does my wife, MIL and my parents. Open Office does what I need it to for work and steam for linux has given me most of the games I want to play. What's more is steams streaming capability meant I swapped to a laptop for my primary machine and stuck my old desktop into the garage for when I want to play windows only games.
Is it perfect? God no. Is it better than Windows for what I or anyone I know uses it for? Absolutely! I also don't have to do much in the way of configuration when I give mint to someone who has never used it before. Install and run. The cinnamon desktop is intuitive, it has pre-installed most of the main programs people want and it is basically bullet proof. All I have to do is show someone how to use the app manager and off they run.
this. I was a Linux guy starting in 94 (I actually still have my infomagick cd set that has the mother's day release on it), and yeah...stopped using it because of systemd. Call me whacky. Moved to FreeBSD. I know, I'm a whiner or something.
It already has about 13.4% US desktop market share already.
I have no idea why Mac OS X isn't called out for being the MOST UNIX operating system out there.
Why bother making a Linux desktop, when you ALREADY have a top-notch Unix desktop environment, with origins in BSD Unix (via NextStep), a proper Unix-shell, and every other command-line tool, with the ability to run real commercial software from Adobe and Autodesk.
Additionally, it seems like Mac OS X has officially won all the developers. I don't recall seeing any developer using anything BUT Mac OS X over the last couple of years.
Unix won the desktop.. it's just called Mac OS X.
I'll wait for MS-BSD.
To make this work, some big company, like google or Intel, would have to throw its weight behind this idea (basically, like what happened with Android).
The desktop market is shrinking. Market share != user share. By market, I mean the amount of money that's spent on desktops.
There's the trend to use mobile devices (iOS and Android) over desktops for many functions. It's not necessarily that people are getting rid of their desktops, but they are relying on them less and it's no longer seen as essential to have the latest and greatest on the desktop because the emphasis is now on phones.
Even Microsoft will giving free upgrades to Windows 10 for home users of windows 7 and 8. Formerly desktop OS upgrades were a lucrative source of income. I suspect that it's worth more to them to sacrifice the dwindling income from selling upgrades in order to be able to drop support for the older versions sooner.
Commercial distributions focus on the server as that's what most of their customers are playing them for. Also, server support is somewhat simpler than desktop support as there are fewer varieties of enterprise server hardware than desktop hardware and it changes less often. The typical scenario is that rookie user buys a new notebook and tries to install Linux, eventually giving up in disgust as there's no driver support for a key piece of hardware. The hardware support will probably come in six months, but it's too late by then for the rookie. Old hands know this and carefully research what they buy to ensure that the drivers are available.
There's never been much of a Linux desktop market. Home users rarely pay for Linux support and business users generally choose Linux or BSD for specialized fields or as a cheaper alternative to Windows/Mac for limited function locked down desktops.
I don't use "desktop features" I use applications. The only features I am interested in as far as a "desktop" are features that keep it out of my way.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What he means is that they in fact used some parts of the FreeBSD kernel combined with the Mach kernel to create the open source XNU kernel that is used in their operating systems.
You could cannibalize some Linux desktop installs.
But it will never be The Year of the *nix on Everyone's Desktop until you get devs and UI people who actually have any idea how normal clueless users work (or even care) and completely shelter them from the *nix underneath. That's anathema to normal *nix devs, so it would take someone like Apple to do it again. But even there almost no OSX users have any clue they're using BSD, and the giving is all one way -> BSD to Apple. Is it really The Year of BSD on the Desktop when nobody knows or cares? If so, it's already here.
It's a pride thing. You want to think that because your OS is so superior under the covers that everyone should be using it and it'll get more of the press it deserves. So you want everyone using it as their desktop and knowing they're doing so, even Mom or your teen kids. But swca dislike that Mom or the kids just want to /use/ it and not RTFM (YMomMV), so we're incapable of making a GUI/application suite that's so amazing they'll feel they have to convert. Even the desperate 'but it's free!' hasn't made a big difference.
So if you want to make a great *nix desktop for yourself, that's great! But thinking you're going to get a random person who thinks the big box is 'the cpu' to use it is just expensive vanity, and has been for almost 20 years. It just leads you to things like Unity.
Besides, even now, five years from 2020, casual users can get everything they need from mobile or web already.
Linux and the BSDs have been chasing desktop usability for ages. Hell, I've been chasing desktop usability for ages.
Microsoft has it easy. The produce windows and all the laptop, desktop, and server vendors spend hundreds of millions of dollars making sure their designs work with it.
Apple makes their own PCs, they don't have to chase hardware.
And us? Every time a new machine comes out (which is often). A new model, a new chipset, a different combination of on-board devices, whatever.. every single time that happens we developers have to write new drivers or modify existing drivers. We have to work out the kinks, the broken mobo hardware, the broken ACPI implementations, the broken sound hardware that doesn't follow vendor specs or has major exceptions because vendors are lazy. We have to glue the whole mess together not just once. Not just twice. But 20 or 30 times a year. Every year. Forever.
Until that equation changes, the general population simply can't depend on any of our open source code to work on whatever new cool computer they want to buy. And that puts us in the backseat in terms of adoption. Every time.
We can make our stuff work with specific machines, at least if the stars align (that is, if we have the chip specs for the chipsets that have changed and we can write drivers for them fast enough). Making our stuff work with everything, out of the box... it just doesn't happen on a macro scale.
In some small way the collapse of the external chip vendors into a much smaller set of companies has helped. Only two major video companies that we have to worry about now, plus whatever Intel is doing (which they at least provide some specs on now, finally). Only two WIFI chipsets that really matter, maybe three. Only a half dozen ethernet chipset families really matter now. Only two cpu vendors really matter. It's getting better but not because the companies are altruistic. Simply because there are fewer of them and we don't have to write as many drivers or make as many driver mods whenever new hardware comes out. But it isn't enough. Not nearly enough to make us competitive.
That's the #1 problem.
The #2 problem we face is that there is no suitable desktop that works as well as either Windows or Mac desktops. I've tried them all. In linux even. They ALL SUCK. They all break in one way or another and it's just as bad in the linux community as it is in the BSD community due to rampant N.I.H. syndrome. The desktops fail on many levels. Apple doesn't have this problem because Apple enforces a unified ABI for accessing major media subsystems such as audio and video. Microsoft doesn't have this problem either, for the same reason. Linux and the BSDs have no unified ABI, essentially forcing application writers to target their apps to specific user interfaces or hardware subsystems.
It annoys the hell out of me but I don't see anything on the horizon that can really solve the problem.
-Matt
It's not the kernel that the source of the problem. It's the desktop. Changing the kernel away from Linux is not going to do diddly squat if we are still saddled with KDE or Mate or Cinnamon or Gnome or Xfce or blasted Unity.
Linux has not won the desktop because the the Linux desktops all blow. I use Xfce, I like it the best because it stays out of my way more than the rest.
Why do so many hackers prefer Mac? It's not for the overpriced hardware. Is it because the suspend works so well? It cannot be for the GUI because the OS X GUI really blows.
Then there's Windows 8, an utterly unusable abomination...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
What a strange question to ask in the summary. Have distributions changed compared to each other? Of course not. Have they changed significantly as a group over the past 10 years? Of course and in big ways. I not to fondly remember digging through text based config files to make the basic desktop work. Not anymore. Networks seen to work reasonably well. The interfaces are no longer confusing, package management from a graphical interface is now useable by grandma, and for the most part I'm finding more and more that everything just works.
To claim there's been no change and therefore BSD suddenly has a chance is simply absurd.
Claiming that distributions don't focus on the desktop ignores the likes of those tiny contenders like oh.... Say.... Ubuntu who was often criticised as focusing too much on the desktop experience and neglecting the rest of what Linux is. They made it usable for the common man, those bastards.
Loving OpenBSD on a laptop. 15 minutes of futzing with configs and a beautiful desktop environment of your choice. I haven't loved this much since Solaris 8. (Oh and that Android is linux bsbs... Google doesn't use glibc for android, they use OpenBSD's libc)
That is a good point. OS X is indeed Unix, officially certified. I've run all Linux for many years. When someone handed me a Mac Pro I thought I'd dislike it, based on my experience with iOS. I was surprised how comfortable it was to use, just like my familiar Linux for day-to-day work at a bash shell. For coordinating with my coworkers, I also have all the Microsoft Office, all of the Adobe developer products, etc. Not bad at all.
Whenever I mention I'm a Linux guy who actually likes OS X, someone goes "no true Scotsman" on me. Open the Linux kernel changelog. See my name, Ray Morris. Look around at some of the Linux storage stack. You'll notice I'm the maintainer for Linux::LVM, for example. So yeah, I'm a real Linux guy - perhaps more so than any other regular commenter on Slashdot.
Put the CD or DVD into the cup-holder slot. Reboot the machine. Answer the simple questions (which are "What language and time zone do you want?" kind of simple, not "What's your BIOS version and disk geometry?" kind of simple.)
If I wanted to run Gentoo or Linux From Scratch or A Really Old Slackware Version, I know where to find them. I'm running Linux to get some work done, not to tweak compatibility settings.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have no idea why people are arguing with you about this. The evidence (not least from the desktop computing industry) is everywhere, with catastrophically declining sales over the long term, offset by increases in mobiles and tablets—which, incidentally, Linux has already won, though in large part by leaving the distro community behind.
Linux could actually conquer the desktop in the end—a few years down the road when desktop computing is a specialized, professionals-only computing space. The users of other desktop operating systems are slowly bleeding off to mobile and tablet.
But this can only happen, ironically, if distros and devs stop trying to conquer the desktop in the present. If they continue down the path they're on, the long-term desktop community, which would be a natural fit for the Linux of yore, will probably be on some other OS. (MacOS? Surely not Windows at this point.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Sounds like marketing bullsh^H^H puffery to me.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
[2] It has to run the programs people want to run, because in the real world they don't want to run some MS Office knockoff, they want to run MS Office. Ditto for Photoshop and the dozens of programs they rely on, some very big name products, some very obscure, to do work, have fun, etc.
What I want to run is Office 2003. But that is becoming less and less of an option thanks to Microsoft.
227-3517
People want "good software" and if that happens to also be "free software" then that is purely by coincidence, but "good software" is the primary concern so if there is no cohesive effort toward that then inevitably the GCC will be abandoned (by most) in favor of Clang/LLVM and Linux will be abandoned (by most) in favor of BSD.
If I may expand on that, I've long held a "survival of the fittest" view that the software that can survive and reproduce in the largest number of environments ultimately will win the evolutionary race. From an environmental point of view, the BSD license provides a much larger environment (that is, fewer restrictions) than the GPL license. (BTW, the term "Free Software" is a wonderful bit of deceptive marketing when you consider how much freer several competing licenses are, such as the BSD and MIT licenses - and even the LGPL.) So, software licensed with the least restrictions will win in the long run.
(Like everyone else in this thread, I'm posting as AC so that my karmic head doesn't get chopped off as I reveal myself to be the infidel that I actually am.)
Which instructions did you use to get the desktop going?
A kernel is not an operating system.
Obviously. Apple also didn't take "BSD and used it as their operating system", they did however use parts of the BSD kernel in their open source XNU kernel. There may also be BSD parts used in their open source operating system called Darwin. But there was no "proprietary forking", you can freely get and use the source code.
pcbsd is looking to be to OSX what reactOS is to windows. and we all know how many users reactOS has. also pcbsd needs a new more hipster name otherwise no it will definitely never catch on
Even OSX's name is just three random letters and it is doing just fine. PC-BSD has a cool name. The "PC" in the front signifies that it is something for the PCs.
Mostly the guide on ribalinux.blogspot.com did it. I didn't follow it exactly because who really wants/needs Dbus. If you google around there's plenty of workable guides, just make sure they point to more recent versions of OpenBSD. Installing XFCE now is as simple as pkg_add XFCE and editing a couple files to get it to automatically fire up by default. The most time consuming part of the affair was getting a new wifi card that OpenBSD supports (~20 dollars) and reflashing my BIOS to remove the Wifi whitelist.
KDE is as ugly as windows.
For me, beauty is part of useability.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Actually the fellows who work on PC-BSD, or most of them, work for a company called iX Systems that provides servers and storage.
Android is based on Linux.
If you're familiar with Daniel Kahneman's works, you'll immediately recognize that this prediction suffers from the "validity illusion". Kahneman and associates have identified under which circumstances you can trust the predictions of an expert . They've found out that in order to create an expert with some kind of credibility when it comes to prediction, the feedback loop of the system of study must be short and quick. This makes it possible for the entity in the mind called "system 1", to actually be trained to the to a sufficient level to make experience-based predictions with some kind of actual validity. Examples of these kind of experts are doctors, firefighters and athletes; they've dealt with the same types of situations hundreds and thousands times forming a vast, intuitive base of experience. Financial and political experts do not have that kind of feedback and therefore their predictions are naturally much less valid. How many times have the author experienced the "break through" of an alternative desktop? His prediction shall be viewed in that light....
there is to *you*, not to normal people. And that's only because you want to argue about it. How many people, supposedly smart people, screamed and whined on about the metro interface in windows 8. Was that all windows 8 was about? No, of course not, but to listen to the complaints it was all that mattered and that shows the point that the interface *IS* the OS.
how strange, software has bugs. no-one never knew or expected that. There doesn't seem to be any bugs marked critical in that list
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
To me beauty is an hindrance and gets in the way. I don't want bouncing icon or transparent windows or hidden menu bars or hidden keyboard shortcuts. It's distracting and make things hard to read. Keep things clear and functional, and yes, I agree with GP, KDE is currently the best for that. For instance [F4] in Dolphin beats any plurely graphical file manager all the way and then some.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
But it doesn't have an X in it. X is what makes things cool.
Last I checked, Hollywood effects companies were all running their serious FX software on Linux desktops.
A lot of industrial grade engineering, scientific, graphics, etc code is *nix based. These users may be running Linux on PC hardware but they don't really want or care about Linux. They want a convenient working *nix to get their work done. Linux is just a convenient option. These people don't really care about the politics, the gpl, etc. If a BSD provided a more convenient option many would migrate.
Very true.
The GPL license offers absolutely NO direct benefit to companies that need a Unix-like OS to put in their products
Yet many companies produce Android devices and some of those devices are HDTV's.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Different demographics use different things.
I'm a software engineer, with a focus on low-level programming and performance, and as far as I'm concerned, all competent people in my field use Linux daily, be it for work or leisure.
I've tried using Windows or Mac OS X, and even with the various extras you need to install to make those on par, they are still light years behind in terms of usability and productivity.
I don't expect Windows or Mac OS X users to understand. From my experience, when I'm forced to use OS X for example and that I ask an OS X user how to do any simple basic thing, he just answers "I don't know. I just don't do that. Maybe you can purchase a third-party app for it.". People that are satisfied with those operating systems are people with simple needs that follow standard one-size-fits-all workflows, they don't even realize you can do so much more with a real operating system you're in control of, where huge capabilities are just at the touch of your fingertips.
I am currently investigating alternative operating systems because I don't want systemd on my boxes.
I have been running Fedora for years and basically have no issue with "systemd" since there is a GUI and command line for control. Unless you can explain why systemd is bad what you have said would be a cause for ridicule in a decision making meeting.
As an "old guy" I don't have any issue with Unix in general or Linux for that matter, I learn what is appropriate and change accordingly. I don't think the server market considers Linux a toy either since it is very popular.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Yep. That's what I was talking about. "Linux" is an unwieldy mess of various "metoo" distributions, "metoo" desktop environments, unstable and always changing APIs (starting down at the kernel, whose developers refuse to support a stable API for binary drivers all the way to desktop APIs who break all APIs with each major release), etc. Why would a mainstream desktop user want to track this mess? Nothing has really changed in the Linux world since the 90s. It's a great OS for the tinkerers and tweakers. I you're one of them, just shut up and enjoy this great OS instead of trying to show it down the throats of the mainstream. It never worked and will never work.
there is to *you*, not to normal people.
However, KDE isn't maintained by normal people.
There's no single free software entity, nowadays, that can handle EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of an Operating System alone.
Desktops are hard enough.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
So, you're suggesting KDE envelop the entire OS and leave everyone else behind with a "my way or the highway" mentality? Interesting idea, but what would they call it?
Windows 8 OEM Service Release 2. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
So the people of FreeNAS also work on PC-BSD ?
And what's the difference there to running Ubuntu or Fedora? I can give Ubuntu to someone and say "run this" and if they are not technically adept, they are none the wiser. Gnome or KDE is the default for most desktop Linux distro. Same would go for your KDE distro, except you'd have one more distro to contend with the others.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
What I want in an operating system is (not necessarily in order of importance):
I want a reliable system that I can depend on at any time. It must be secure so I do not have to be too concerned about exploitable flaws; it must maintain continuity, be consistent and not change in ways that take long to adapt to; it must be maintainable by me, which means transparent in the setup, configuration and execution; and it must be adaptable (again by me) to my changing needs and platforms. Lastly, the system must be flexible, which, in my opinion, is what defines *NIX systems, i.e. small tools that can be combined in numerous ways to solve complex problems.
What I do not want is:
If I had more time, I could probably expand more on these.
To return to systemd: It seems to break quite a few of my wants and wantnots and (at least for me) does not solve any problems I have encountered but forces me into choices I would rather have avoided.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
I may have misunderstood your post, but without licenses like the GPL the people using the Linux kernel in proprietary devices would simply never make their code available. I'm not sure you made a point, or that the one you made is valid.
Which makes me wonder: would Google leave Android as open source if they didn't have to due to key components being GPL'ed? I think the answer is yes, because there's a clear business case for them doing so. The ability of phone makers to customize Android is necessary to commoditize the Android phones themselves so that Google can profit from related services.
These guys don't know the first thing about marketing. Their logo doesn't look quite as shitty as other FOSS project logos, but that's about it. I couldn't even find screenshots.
Want to have some obscure half-assed unfinished FOSS project to become the most hyped and famous?
Here, this is how you do it. (Note: That site is outdated, but it was the best for a FOSS project back then)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The only advantage that BSD has is the ability to piss off developers. People describe the GPL as some sort of communist crusade but it really came about because of rather practical considerations.
Most charitable people don't want to feel they have been taken advantage of.
Beyond that, the Toddler's Dilemma really impacts very few people. Most people (and even companies) don't see the need to pretend that someone else's work is their exclusive property.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
YES
THERE
ARE
That's utterly ridiculous. There's a lot more to an OS than just the desktop environment (DE): there's the kernel, the init system and other low-level daemons, the display subsystem, the package manager, and of course lots of apps (beyond just what KDE (or Gnome) include in their software collections). The KDE team has enough work to do, they certainly don't want to become their own distro, when there's already several distros that feature KDE as a prominent DE (Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE for starters).
You do realize that KDE is maintained on more than just Linux - including BSDs, Unix, Mac, and even *gasp* Windows. Some ports (like the Windows port) are not as far along as the others - well, pretty much just the Windows port last I checked, and that's primarily because of Windows not having some of the requisite functionality yet.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
You can see who works on PC-BSD by checking out the commit history on the official github repo Kris Moore is one of the main contributors and is a really nice guy. He works for iXsystems.
FreeNAS is a different beastie. Here is the github. As you can see there is actually very little overlap, but a lot of cross pollination between the various BSDs.
Well ... https://github.com/freenas/fre... here we've got iXsystems as COMPANY :D.
Actually, I do realize that, which is why MikeRT's suggestion is even more ridiculous. Why would the KDE team want to restrict themselves to making their own OS when they already are used on multiple different OSes? The whole thing makes no sense.
which was based on MACH, which was derived from BSD
Mach was developed as a replacement kernel for the existing kernel in BSD operating systems. But that's neither here nor there, of course it has many BSD components but the idea that it was "proprietary forking" is nonsense, the parts derived from BSD and Mach exist in Darwin which is open source.
Dancing icons or what ever you mention has nothing to do with beauty.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No phone no future
While iXsystems does own both OSs, I think PC-BSD has a number of things that should be quite independent of what's happening on the FreeBSD side. For starters, device drivers. I've written here in the past about shoddy support for WiFi - INTEL'S. The other day, I tried doing a GoToMeeting session, and it didn't work, despite having both Chromium & FireFox on the box. FreeBSD has no reason to support WiFi or webcams, but my usage was one of the rare but critical instances that causes people to have a second Windows laptop/tablet for precisely that.
If PC-BSD waits for FreeBSD, it'll wait forever, since FreeBSD does NOT have the same priorities that PC-BSD should have. FreeBSD does well as a server OS already deployed by many companies, such as Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, as well as a router OS for companies like Juniper. On top of that, it's the basis of free Router/Networking OSs such as pFsense, and have a good backing from Apple. So FreeBSD is already a success in its own realm. PC-BSD so far has not managed to go beyond that: it's currently little more than FreeBSD w/ an X11 installer (incidentally, if the BSDs add Wayland support, that too should be a PC-BSD, rather than a FreeBSD project), smooth and admirable package managers (PBI w/ portsng) and a stripped down version of PC-BSD w/o the X11 called TrueOS. This won't do! PC-BSD needs to define its own goals, like being an acceptable alternative to both Windows & Linux on laptops and tablets not made by Apple.
A good list of projects for PC-BSD to have would be
So far, PC-BSD has done an impressive job in making most applications behave the same way, whether run under KDE, Lumina or LXDE. An exception is GTK3 apps, which run fine under GNOME, but misbehave under other DEs, often going fullscreen (not maximized).
When I bought a new laptop last year, it came w/ Windows 8.1, which was unusable, due to the hot corners and all that. I had visited a Linux Expo and met the FreeBSD guys, and got a PC-BSD DVD from them. Initially, the laptop had trouble recognizing it, but once I went into BIOS and changed the bootup settings, that got fixed. This was during 10.0, before the current version that includes UEFI support (and which needs to be installed from scratch - that part can't be an upgrade). I made a conscious decision to wipe out Windows 8.1 and not look back (which I couldn't have anyway, since the laptop didn't come w/ a Windows 8.1 DVD - another brilliant decision by MS)
My setup has worked well, w/ a few exceptions. It doesn't recognize the Intel WiFi, so I have to run an Ethernet cable from the router to the laptop, making it effectively a desktop. Last week, somebody needed to have a GoToMeeting session w/ me, and since the webcam is not recognized, that didn't happen. I also have a Brother P-touch label maker that has its own driver internally, and so obviously, that only works w/ Windows and nothing else. But other than this, I have had no issues, since all my usage is either in browsers (I use both Chromium and FireFox) or Thunderbird. For the Office application, I tend to use Calligra, but I guess others will prefer Libre-Office. I've created multiple users in the system for different roles that I play - one account for my office, one for my personal things like banking and other services, one for the various blogs including /., one for games and so on. For each of them, I use different DEs to experiment w/ them and get used to them. I use Lumina (primarily), KDE, LXDE and both GNOME3 classic shell and GNOME3.
One thing that happened a couple of months ago to my surprise. I had to change my router from a Belkin to a Linksys, which changes the gateway address from 192.168.2.1 to 192.168.1.1. I tried going into various text terminals and changing it, but wouldn't work. Ultimately, I found out, by trial & error, that I was supposed to go into the Control Panel and change it from there. Once I did, it worked like a charm. The PC-BSD handbook does a good job in telling you how to do things, but falls flat on its face if something doesn't work as it should.
While it could be a lot better, my PC-BSD experience has been satisfactory.
You can't build Mac apps on Darwin alone, which is why it makes sense to say that "Darwin is open source" but OS X is not.
I would certainly agree with that. I was only disputing that the parts of BSD that Apple did fork have become proprietary - because they haven't - they have formed the open source basis upon which Apple's proprietary frameworks are built.
Make KDE into a full OS. Fork Kubuntu, tell all other distributions that KDE will provide them access to the sources and patches, but KDE intends to become a full competing desktop and tablet OS. Ubuntu vs Mint vs Fedora makes no sense to the casual users I know. If I could hand them a copy of KDE and say "run this" that would improve things tremendously.
It almost is. Consider all those applications that would previously be prefaced by K - KMail, Kontacts, Krita, KOffice, et al. In fact, KOffice has become Calligra, which is reasonably good, but could be better. And they've dealt w/ the multiple platform issue a lot better than Microsoft did: they have KDE Plasma Desktop for desktops, Plasma Netbooks for laptops & netbooks, and Plasma Active for tablets, phones & phablets.
In fact, for a while, PC-BSD, and previously, another BSD called DesktopBSD, was KDE only. It was only in version 9 that they added support for some 8 different window managers.
Exactly
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Yes, he joined them in 2013. He is their CTO I believe now. But PC-BSD is quite a bit older than that.
I am currently investigating alternative operating systems because I don't want systemd on my boxes. Not looking forward to any dependency issues if I decided to "unfuck" a modern Linux distro.
*BSD is looking more and more attractive.
Sheesh, will you just switch over already? This systemd BS is getting about as old as the "women in STEM careers" bullshit.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have been running Fedora for years and basically have no issue with "systemd" since there is a GUI and command line for control. Unless you can explain why systemd is bad what you have said would be a cause for ridicule in a decision making meeting.
My honest idea of the issue is that it's like politics. Someone somewhere didn't like the infighting in the inclusion of systemd, and like good little politicos, some people line up to oppose it. I truly suspect that most people who hate it with a passion don't even know why. I can never get good answers as to why it sucks so bad either, merely vague generalizations that read like a Sarah Palin speech at the Iowa freedom caucus.
I've no issues with systemd myself, use the dreaded pulse audio, and have had success, haven't had any computers explode or quit working.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Their open-source contributions have always seemed to me to be letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law.
Their open source contributions seem to be in the spirit of open source rather than the letter-of-the-law, as you say they aren't legally required to release their contributions but they do anyway. Sure they aren't releasing the source to everything that the code is linked with like restrictive free software licensing enforces but that's the great thing about permissive open source, it allows free and proprietary authors to work together and leaves the choice of what contributions to make up to the author and not restrict other authors. Whereas restrictive open source licensing is a "my way or the highway" approach.
That's a terrible idea. It's not Ubuntu vs Mint vs Fedora, it's Ubuntu vs Debian vs Gentoo vs Arch - there's a massive spectrum of distros in terms of ease of use, stability, customizability, etc. There is no one size fits all solution - a rock solid production system is going to be completely different to a bleeding edge development system.
Separating distros from upstream projects is also important because the upstream projects rely on distros adopting their latest software at different times to maintain stability. Users of bleeding edge distros like Arch effectively test the software for users of more conservative distros like Debian.
It's also worth noting that Kubuntu is probably one of the worst KDE-based distros - IIRC, the 4.0 release mess was exacerbated by their maintainers configuring things poorly. And let's not forget that KDE is leaning towards using systemd internally... (I use systemd myself, but I think the idea of forcing it upon users is ludicrous.)
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I have to see it to believe it. I am sure there are many efforts taken to bring FOSS to the masses, but until Outlook and Word run seamlessly on BSD the revolution is purely imaginary. We see it with the Firefox, Windows, and Fire Phones, the app gap (and partially craptastic hardware) turn these into total flops. Will BSD run the latest computer games? Will BSD be easy to install, maintain, and secure for anyone with even the smallest skill set? Will it run all apps seamlessly across desktop/server/tablet/phone/TV/fridge/whateverelse ? And above all, when I walk up to a BSD desktop will it just work every single time? Will there be a more than compelling case to use PC BSD in corporate offices? If the PC BSD masterminds can answer all these questions with "yes" then I think they are on the right track. I doubt it and 5 years until 2020 is not enough time to fix all this.