Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
.
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.
PC-BSD has its own installer. It's really quite nice and should be very familiar to anyone who is used to Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL/CentOS
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.
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).
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 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.
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
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.
The fact that people buy a new phone every year and only buy a desktop every 7 years does not imply that they use their desktop less than they used to or even less than their phone. While there has been a mild decline in desktop use, mobile use has been largely supplementary not a replacement.
This space intentionally left blank
Will we still have desktops by then? Seriously doesn't anyone think they will eventually get these silly glasses to work and we can carry our computer around in our pocket? I've been trying to find ways to short companies that sell office furniture and desk chairs. Hope I'm not wrong on this.