# Project Trident Sunset



## Minbari (Oct 30, 2021)

Everything touched by "dynamite brothers" goes on hiatus. Can't wait to see the announcement about the death of the "BSD desktop environment" a.k.a Lumina. 
Project Trident Sunset


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## Alain De Vos (Oct 30, 2021)

I think it was written in the stars. I see the future more in sway/labwc.


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## mark_j (Oct 30, 2021)

I'm surprised interest in it lasted that long. 
This was the one that swapped to a Linux kernel and became just another "distribution" among the dozens of others.
I never used it, so I don't know if I am missing much?


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## grahamperrin@ (Oct 31, 2021)

<https://old.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/qiwhzq/-/>



mark_j said:


> 𒀦… I never used it, so I don't know if I am missing much?



Heritage :: Project Trident ◀ <https://web.archive.org/web/20200424111117/https://www.truenas.com/trueos-discontinuation/> ◀ <https://web.archive.org/web/20200416093636/https://www.trueos.org/> | <https://web.archive.org/web/20160808160014/https://www.trueos.org/> (2016) ◀ <https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pcbsd.org/> – not forgetting PC-BSD, a long and respectable heritage. 

<https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/535465> recalls that PC-BSD was my stepping stone away from Apple systems … glancing at <https://web.archive.org/web/20141229193002/http://www.pcbsd.org/>, I guess that I switched in 2013 or 2014. Over time, I became as passionate about PC-BSD and TrueOS as I had been about Mac OS X. 

<https://ftp.icm.edu.pl/packages/pcbsd/iso/11.0-CURRENTJUNE2016/amd64/docs/html/pcbsd.html> lacks images, still it's a useful reminder of how PC-BSD was in 2016. 

Truly the end of an era. I wish them well.


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## zirias@ (Oct 31, 2021)

Minbari said:


> Can't wait to see the announcement about the death of the "BSD desktop environment" a.k.a Lumina.


I guess it will come. But it's unfortunate. Quite some time ago, I read a presentation about Lumina design and architecture, and also some blog post about the roadmap to 2.0. It was full of good ideas – in a nutshell, work _with_ the OS you're running on, instead of inventing a lot of over-complicated abstractions. Now I'm pretty sure 2.0 will never become reality.

I tried myself a Lumina 1.4.x version – it was clumsy, just not there yet, some things didn't work, some things just looked awful, etc. – so much that I still prefer my own combination of fvwm (with some of its modules), picom, stalonetray, xclock, etc as a light-weight alternative to a full-featured DE like KDE (which IMHO is still the best full-featured DE).


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## cynwulf (Nov 11, 2021)

IX "pulling out of FreeBSD" reads more like a roadmap rather than some dynamic chain of events which just occurred over a few years.

I doubt Trident was ever a serious proposition. More like a means of offloading unwanted software projects while minimising any fallout. When it switched to Linux, the whole thing just  seemed utter vapourware from that point on.


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## BSD-Kitsune (Dec 6, 2021)

Linux in general has eclipsed in a number of fields over FreeBSD, and there's numerous reasons:

1. Corporate backing. The BSDs are always playing catch-up reimplementing stuff from Linux or other drivers, and there's just not a lot of codesharing like in the early days. Kernels, userlands, libcs they've all diverged incompatibly. 

2. Unfortunately, most people are backwards. Whereas I buy something and look at the hardware and match it to the OS, most buy hardware first and match to the OS and don't wanna spend time dealing with alternatives. 

3. FreeBSD, development-wise, has a lot less killer apps than it did 10-20 years ago. ZFS-On-Linux is packaged by Ubuntu now, and corporate backing has made Linux's network stack far better than FreeBSDs. Resting on one's laurels and following a crowd will do. that. 

Really, if you want to survive in the FOSS pond and not have your corporation pool shrink, you need three things:

1. A home corporation, ala how RedHat has been for the Linux kernel for decades now. Linux in the corporate world is mostly referring to RedHat, or derivatives. 
2. Hardware platforms that specifically have engineered support for your OS. For Linux, this is many things sold by HPE, Dell and other big server companies, or System76 for desktops
3. Compelling, unique reasons and marketing for your OS. FreeBSD's list has shrunk. That's not a good sign.

To fix this is not an easy process, and to be fair, this has affected non-FOSS OSes as well. HP-UX lived and died with Itanium, the last in a long line of HPE-produced hardware. Solaris, same song and dance. Fujitsu went to ARM, and that's the end for SPARC. AIX will live and die with POWER, if POWER dies, then AIX goes too. 

There's not much that can be done.


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## Alain De Vos (Dec 6, 2021)

Two names i don't hear. IBM & Redhat.


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## freezr (Dec 6, 2021)

BSD-Kitsune said:


> Linux in general has eclipsed in a number of fields over FreeBSD, and there's numerous reasons:
> 
> 1. Corporate backing. The BSDs are always playing catch-up reimplementing stuff from Linux or other drivers, and there's just not a lot of codesharing like in the early days. Kernels, userlands, libcs they've all diverged incompatibly.
> 
> ...



You mentioned all the reason why I am leaving Linux for FreeBSD... If would be ever happening this then I'll move to Haiku... They even got HW acceleration through Vulkan:






						Haiku OS Managing To Run Zink OpenGL Atop Radeon Vulkan Driver For 3D Acceleration - Phoronix
					






					www.phoronix.com


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## astyle (Dec 6, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> Two names i don't hear. IBM & Redhat.


Grep for them, they're there.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 6, 2021)

BSD-Kitsune said:


> Corporate backing



This is has done more damage to Linux and it's sovereignty than anything. Don't tell me Red Hat is all good and altruistic just because they're crap is GPL'd. In BSD land, they have to follow us or lose.


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## kpedersen (Dec 6, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> This is has done more damage to Linux and it's sovereignty than anything.


I don't know too much about it so do take the following with a pinch of salt.

However, for FreeBSD we have:

https://www.ixsystems.com/ (Vague ties with BSDi)
https://klarasystems.com/

As corporate backers and yet they don't seem malignant unlike many of the backers for Linux. I believe this is because they sponsor and donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation rather than hire developers and do their specific work themselves. This means that they don't tread on everyone's toes and if their interests end up going against the FreeBSD community, it doesn't matter, the FreeBSD Foundation will be the ones delegating *useful* tasks and funding.

It is too late for Linux. The open source community (the true innovators) are merely along for the ride rather than leading development. It is a little sad to see but this is *exactly* the reason why other free platforms exist to pick up the slack.


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## astyle (Dec 6, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> This is has done more damage to Linux and it's sovereignty than anything. Don't tell me Red Hat is all good and altruistic just because they're crap is GPL'd. In BSD land, they have to follow us or lose.


 Can we please keep it civil and technical? Politics is crap no matter how you slice it.


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## Beastie7 (Dec 6, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> I don't know too much about it so do take the following with a pinch of salt.
> 
> However, for FreeBSD we have:
> 
> ...



Bingo!


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## msplsh (Dec 6, 2021)

Doesn't Juniper and Netflix factor in here?


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## Beastie7 (Dec 6, 2021)

astyle said:


> Can we please keep it civil and technical? Politics is crap no matter how you slice it.



Meh. You've got a point.


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## BSD-Kitsune (Dec 7, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> This is has done more damage to Linux and it's sovereignty than anything. Don't tell me Red Hat is all good and altruistic just because they're crap is GPL'd. In BSD land, they have to follow us or lose.



I didn't say it was a good thing in that particular application, but it has ensured Linux gets a ton of development that it wouldn't otherwise. 

With iXSystems winding down FreeBSD operations, I suspect it'll eventually no longer back FreeBSD -- it wouldn't make sense otherwise. That means FreeBSD loses one of its few sponsors.


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## Paul Floyd (Dec 7, 2021)

BSD-Kitsune said:


> Linux in general has eclipsed in a number of fields over FreeBSD, and there's numerous reasons:



It is a bit of a pain that Linux seems to make up the (userland) rules as it goes along. That makes porting difficult.

I don't have much of an idea how FreeBSD is going in "the market", either as a % or total users.

FreeBSD does have some advantages for corporations (permissive license). And it does seem to continue to attract input from academia still (for instance, capsicum, though that was 6 years ago or so). The Linux kernel is pretty much all developed by corporates these days.


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## BSD-Kitsune (Dec 8, 2021)

FreeBSD is not from what I've been reading growing very much if at all, but that can probably change. I would say it needs to make a new killer app to replace ZFS as that position (ZFS being basically packageable on almost every other competitor OS that matters) has been usurped. You cannot rest on your laurels if you want to increase market share. 

I don't care so much about market share, but I do care about the direction of products I use. As time has gone on, NetBSD looks to be more inline with my /personal/ needs and use cases because FreeBSD has diverged from what I want from an OS. But I've resigned that eventually I'll need to form a group and we'll need to roll our own OS.


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## astyle (Dec 8, 2021)

BSD-Kitsune said:


> FreeBSD is not from what I've been reading growing very much if at all, but that can probably change. I would say it needs to make a new killer app to replace ZFS as that position (ZFS being basically packageable on almost every other competitor OS that matters) has been usurped. You cannot rest on your laurels if you want to increase market share.
> 
> I don't care so much about market share, but I do care about the direction of products I use. As time has gone on, NetBSD looks to be more inline with my /personal/ needs and use cases because FreeBSD has diverged from what I want from an OS. But I've resigned that eventually I'll need to form a group and we'll need to roll our own OS.


Fun project to roll your own, but maintenance is a LOT of work. The Internet is littered with Linux (and BSD, as well) projects that have been abandoned after just a few years when the founding group runs into the issue of maintenance.


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## BSD-Kitsune (Dec 8, 2021)

Yeah. Of course it does. Look at Source Linux, yggdrasil, archbsd/pacbsd, starchlinux, etc.


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## drewlander (Dec 15, 2021)

I tried it out for a bit when it was still based on FreeBSD. I have a dual graphics card laptop (Intel/NVIDIA) and it worked better than most other Linux distros (except PopOS) for an out of the box configuration. Everything just worked which is great because I am lazy. 
I switched off that and installed straight FreeBSD w/ZFS so I have no idea how well it worked when they switched off the FreeBSD base.


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## Alain De Vos (Dec 15, 2021)

astyle said:


> Fun project to roll your own, but maintenance is a LOT of work. The Internet is littered with Linux (and BSD, as well) projects that have been abandoned after just a few years when the founding group runs into the issue of maintenance.


It's interesting to look at the projects which did survive. There was always something special.
Openbsd said :" Security is everything"
Dragonfly said: "Let me patch this filesystem & associated kernel"
On the other hand i don't expect to hear alot from Lumina.

Sndio going from openbsd to freebsd proves that dynamics are important. Without openbsd there was no sndio.


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## kpedersen (Dec 16, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> Sndio going from openbsd to freebsd proves that dynamics are important. Without openbsd there was no sndio.


Is FreeBSD adopting sndio? I had no idea.

OpenBSD's audio always "just worked" which was obviously great. However with FreeBSD, the audio system was really flexible so if it didn't work immediately (10% of machines I tend to run) I could modify it so it could (even though I never truly understood the NID stuff). So I don't know which one I prefer.


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## Alain De Vos (Dec 16, 2021)

Openbsd developed sndio. And freebsd implemented openbsd sndio in the port audio/sndio.
In my make.conf i have something like "without pulse" "without pulseaudio" "with sndio" "with sniod", and this work great.


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