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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lemme see if I understand your logic here:
Linux on the desktop isn't sufficiently popular yet with mainstream users, so Linux users should just give it up and go out and buy brand-new Apple or MS computers running half-assed desktop OSes, as you put it.
Huh?
I've been using KDE for over 15 years now, and it works just fine, quite well in fact. Why would I want to give that up and switched to a "half-assed" (you said it, not me) desktop OS like MacOSX or Windows? KDE isn't half-assed at all, and has only been getting better and better, while staying quite stable and not removing any useful features the way those two proprietary OSes have. So why exactly should I switch?
If you're just saying we should stop trying to convince everyone else to change (it's a little vague), why? Sure, most people are dumb and are going to continue to buy into the big corps' crap, but Linux on the desktop has only been getting better and easier to use, so why not? Lots of people have switched their family members over to great effect (my wife gets along just fine with KDE on Linux Mint). Who cares if Linux never gets to 95% marketshare? As long as it's popular enough to not be as completely unknown as, say, PC-BSD (my wife and my elderly mother both know what Linux is, though to different degrees,, but if I ask either of them about BSD I'm just going to get a blank stare), and users are able to use it without a lot of roadblocks throw in the way like back around 2000, that's good enough. It doesn't need to become a monopoly-of-sorts, it only needs to be strong enough to be a viable alternative, not just for techies but for anyone who has enough technical ability to plug a USB drive in and follow some simple on-screen instructions. And as far as I'm concerned, it already is.
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.
it's been decades and Linux is still no closer to that goal.
First, it's only been about 15 years at the most, and second, yes it is. Back in the late 90s, installing Linux was not really an easy process and took some expertise and a lot of screwing around. Now, you just put a Linux Mint .iso on a thumb drive, pop it into your PC, reboot, and follow some prompts, and after a half-hour, viola! you have Linux installed. It's easy as pie. It's quite easy to use these days too, as long as you don't use stupid Gnome3. KDE works wonderfully for both advanced users and users coming from Windows.
Instead focus on the servicing the niche and/or looking to the future of computing
What future of computing? Are you one of those morons who thinks we're all going to abandon desktops (/laptops) and do all our programming, graphics design, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. on our cellphones and tablets?
The future of computing is desktop PCs. They aren't going anywhere, for doing serious work. For some tasks, like watching videos or reading e-books, other devices are taking those roles over to some extent. People are doing more things with computing devices, so the market is expanding, and mobile devices are enabling usage that was either impractical or impossible before. This doesn't mean that desktops are dying, it just means they're a mature market.
Keep pushing shit uphill if you want, the desktop is becoming less and less relevant.
So you are one of those morons. Did you type this post on a phone?
the fact remains that most end-user software doesn't run on it
What software? Steam runs fine on it, and lots of other software has moved to running in web browsers. People are using less and less proprietary software, and desktops are becoming more confined to being used for specific apps: web browsers mainly, plus office apps.
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
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.
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The desktop is increasingly unimportant, or mostly an adjunct to where people do their primary computing which is portables.
Maybe my viewpoint is skewed by overexposure to the real world where people need to get stuff done, but when people have work to do, they use laptops or desktops.
Right now is the perfect time for linux (or BSD) to attack desktop exactly because everyone else is attacking portable. Apple is a side case, having never taken the desktop world either, but Microsoft is making a strategic blunder that we've sadly already need from another actor in the last decade: Blackberry.
Microsoft owns business. They don't own server, they don't own portable, they don't own entertainment, but they damn sure own productivity.
That's not new, or jazzy, or flashy. However, it is profitable. Businesses have pockets. The last time I needed a license for visual studio, my employer said "as long as you're going through the acquisition process, get three copies so we have some spares and don't have to do this next time we want one". Business, people. It's where the money is.
Blackberry had that, once. They owned the phone you use when you're on a deadline. They used to be the only phone company whos devices had certification to be used by the USDoD, because although they lacked myspace integration, they did have strong disk encryption.
But then do you know what they did? They lost it. To Apple, of all people. Apple got the encryption certification, and now only iPhones can be used by the USDoD, no Blackberrys allowed. Blackberry spent so much time trying to be a competitor to Apple and Android in the "phone you use all the time" field, they neglected a key business feature that gave them total monopoly over a department with nearly bottomless pockets, and now they have nothing because newsflash, Blackberry isn't apple and never will be.
Microsoft is now busy doing the same thing. Turns out that voice recognition software that listens to and uploads everything in case you talk to it and file uploading software that syncs everything in your my documents folder without asking aren't features that the business world wants. I'm sure consumers want them, but consumers have never been the mainstay of Microsofts income.
If Microsoft had any brains, they'd take a leaf from Adobes book. They'd return to boring and invisible, but comfortable and indispensable, totally ignore piracy by individuals (or better yet, free for non-commercial & non-educational use) for all their software, and aim to sell exclusively to businesses. Photoshop is the premiere editing suite because everyone knows how to use it because it's freely available on torrent website and Adobe never bothers to crack down on it, so all the tutorials are for Photoshop. BAM, lock-in.
As it stands, it's looking increasingly likely that businesses will start moving to Apple, because Linux is still too hard for most people, but Microsoft is compromising business needs. I'm already beginning to see the transition happening.
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.