# FuryBSD is dead..



## jjsingh (Oct 31, 2020)

A sad news indeed.. Another one fallen. ☹


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## xtouqh (Oct 31, 2020)

Sad why?


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## a6h (Oct 31, 2020)

It was dead inside from day one. FreeBSD is not Linux. Distro-fication is doomed!


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## Beastie7 (Oct 31, 2020)

it really shouldn’t have existed. It was PC-BSD 2.0.


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## bsduck (Nov 1, 2020)

For those looking for a polished out-of-the-box FreeBSD desktop there is still GhostBSD. I personally don't like the MATE desktop much (there is also a Xfce version but it is unofficial and poorly finished) but I think the project is interesting otherwise, it comes with lots of things preconfigured for desktop use and a few useful custom tools like a graphical wifi manager.

While I prefer building my desktop systems from scratch, I think ready-to-use products definitely have their place in the ecosystem. They are also quite practical for testing hardware compatibility without having to install.


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## Phishfry (Nov 1, 2020)

bsduck said:


> it comes with lots of things preconfigured for desktop use and a few useful custom tools like a graphical wifi manager.


Which thankfully is available in our ports system net-mgmt/networkmgr


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## a6h (Nov 1, 2020)

PSA, How to setup WM/DE on a FreeBSD system:








						Chapter 5. The X Window System
					

This chapter describes how to install and configure Xorg on FreeBSD, which provides the open source X Window System used to provide a graphical environment




					www.freebsd.org


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## jjsingh (Nov 1, 2020)

I personally never tried FuryBSD. I wrote sad because I think it did contributed something in the popularity of BSD if not nothing. I prefer FreeBSD btw. vigole truth to be told I really want to use FreeBSD as a desktop OS it's not because LINUX can't fulfill my needs, it's because I find FreeBSD more free and open than LINUX and I do keep handbook PDF handy in my phone but thanks anyways. I did saw GhostBSD was facing some issues couple of months back, I hope it won't close it's curtains anytime soon.


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## Mjölnir (Nov 1, 2020)

Phishfry said:


> Which thankfully is available in our ports system net-mgmt/networkmgr


and for KDE/Qt there is net/wpa_supplicant_gui.  Surprisingly, both do NOT depend on a sound package...


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## xtouqh (Nov 1, 2020)

I find having more/better drivers, or e.g. the work *shkhln* does with porting linux steam and prodding the devs into fixing linux compat issues, much more contributing to "popularity of BSD" than yet another "distribution".  Of course, everyone is free to waste their own time on whatever projects they like, but to me it's one of the downsides of open source communities, with all that useless forking and duplicating (in best case) of efforts.


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## a6h (Nov 1, 2020)

jjsingh said:


> I really want to use FreeBSD as a desktop OS it's not because LINUX can't fulfill my needs, it's because I find FreeBSD more free and open than LINUX and I do keep handbook PDF handy in my phone


When you start to learn FreeBSD, it seems it's a little harder than Linux (just a little may I say!), but it isn't. For me it wasn't because after DOS/Windows my 1st experience with Libre, unix-like (or whatever they want to call it these days) operating systems was FreeBSD. You have to push a little and read through documentation. After that, you'll recognise it's far more easier than Linux. Beside that it makes more sense. You'll discover there's rationale behind the design and structure of FreeBSD operating system. There's no such element in GNU/Linux environment, only rationalisations.

GNU/Linux has a big fat problem in their hands. They want to be unix and at the same time turn to a windows alternative. Forget about unix and posix, Linux wants to be the next Windows. Unless Microsoft or other big corporations buy them, they can't. Full-feature and easy to use Desktop OS with shinny installer to support every single combination of different hardware needs capital. You have to spend load of cash everywhere, from developer to public relation.

I thinks FreeBSD can be next big Desktop OS, but it needs cash! At the moment Project and Foundation doesn't have such capital. But it is not impossible.



> I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water. Just send your cash.


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## fonsly (Nov 4, 2020)

I never knew why it could be dead, if we can still get it everywhere online...


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## a6h (Nov 5, 2020)

fonsly said:


> I never knew why it could be dead, if we can still get it everywhere online...


That's correct, but only up to a point. You're fine until `svn update /usr/src` or `svn update /usr/ports` produces *A*, *D*, *U*, etc. At this point, _(/dev/random)BSDs_ will hose you down!


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## d43m0n (Nov 5, 2020)

I knew (and tried): GhostBSD; NomadBSD; OpenBSD; NetBSD. There are some options for a non experienced user/dared user to try.


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## xtouqh (Nov 5, 2020)

d43m0n said:


> GhostBSD; NomadBSD; OpenBSD; NetBSD


Why would you put first 2 and last 2 in the same sentence?


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## scottro (Nov 5, 2020)

Perhaps showing that they made use of things aimed at less experieneced users and others aimed at more experienced. (Not that I'm saying I know their mind, but just how it seems to me).  I liked FreesBie when it was around, I'd use it to give folks a quick intro to how well FreeBSD could work, and though I  never used FuryBSD, I'm sorry to see it go. Folks forget how, before Ubuntu, Linux support was scarce, but after it helped popularize Linux, by being (at the time) more likely  to work out of the box than others, hardware and software vendors seemed more willing to support it. While people seem to decry a BSD that worked out of the box, it's quite possible that were such to come along, it might do more to help than to hurt FreeBSD. And for those who say, oh no, then we'll get newcomers asking dumb questions, simple, just ignore their posts. I find it hard to believe that anyone's day is so full that clicking on what turned out to be a dumb question really interferes with their life.

(My original post mistakenly read Nomad, not FuryBSD. I've fixed it).


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## xtouqh (Nov 5, 2020)

scottro said:


> Folks forget how, before Ubuntu, Linux support was scarce, but after it helped popularize Linux


It didn't, "desktop" linux is still isn't a thing, and "enterprise" interest in linux where all the "cool stuff" came from is irrelevant to ubuntu's attempts at desktop.


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## xavi (Nov 5, 2020)

scottro said:


> and though I never used Nomad, I'm sorry to see it go


Did you mean FuryBSD? As far as I can tell NomadBSD is still live. But perhaps I'm missing something?


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## scottro (Nov 5, 2020)

xavi said:


> Did you mean FuryBSD? As far as I can tell NomadBSD is still live. But perhaps I'm missing something?



Yes, I've fixed it in the original post (with a mention of my error, so people understand your post). Thanks for catching that.


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## Mjölnir (Nov 5, 2020)

I happened to reply in a harsh & impatient fashion to a what I considered a dumb question & hopefully I'll never make that mistake again.  Every _noob_ has every right to enjoy the benefits of (one of) the best, advanced & truly free OS that exist.  Period.  Quoting Eisenhower again:  _"[...] Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. [...]"_  Yes, FreeBSD is a professional system, but it should be available to everyone.  This implies the wizzards are willing to share their knowlegde, even when it's sometimes inconvenient. Remember the time will come when you're asking someone for the inconvenience to clean your butt... oh wait, maybe we'll have robots for that then.


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## a6h (Nov 5, 2020)

mjollnir said:


> Quoting Eisenhower again: _"[...] Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. [...]_


Thanks for quoting Eisenhower properly. Quoting Eisenhower's full statement without censoring final words are very rare. There's a tendency among the many to censor the last part i.e. "scientific-technological elite". I wonder why. No I don't!


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## msplsh (Nov 5, 2020)

xtouqh said:


> "desktop" linux is still isn't a thing


It's called a Chromebook.


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## xtouqh (Nov 7, 2020)

msplsh said:


> It's called a Chromebook.


Nice joke.


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## fel1x (Dec 29, 2020)

RIP. Good news is GhostBSD is now in TOP50 according to distrowatch.com

But I wonder why we need GUI in FreeBSD. CLI is enough for it. Maybe it makes newbies easier to adopt to the system, but there are not much gui software for FreeBSD.


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## scottro (Dec 29, 2020)

It gives people with mild curiosity more incentive to see what FreeBSD is. People who don't (yet) want to put much effort into it but might find that they like it, get an interest in it, and become developers who create some program useful to the rest of us, in my humble opinion.  Some folks fear that a simple to use one will bring the newcomers asking the silly questions, but seriously, how much will that affect my life?  Whereas someone taking an interest, and winding up developing something useful will have a good effect on my life.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 29, 2020)

mintchoco said:


> RIP. Good news is GhostBSD is now in TOP50 according to distrowatch.com
> 
> But I wonder why we need GUI in FreeBSD. CLI is enough for it. Maybe it makes newbies easier to adopt to the system, but there are not much gui software for FreeBSD.


There are thousands of "GUI" applications for FreeBSD. You can run it as a desktop if you'd like. Perhaps that is not your use case?


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Dec 29, 2020)

vigole said:


> I thinks FreeBSD can be next big Desktop OS, but it needs cash! At the moment Project and Foundation doesn't have such capital. But it is not impossible.


This is highly unlikely for the same reason that Linux isn't a big desktop OS -it doesn't have the architecture for it. There're a lot of things about FreeBSD that would have to be completely changed in order to make it a big desktop OS -the first of which is that it doesn't even come with it's own desktop by default. Additionally, it allows far too much customization, far too many config files that need to be manually edited, & no standard way to easily change configurations with a GUI. To date, there's only been one major organization that's been able to successfully make a good desktop os with it & that's NeXT. To do it, they had to remove a few things & add a few other things. And when Apple bought them out, they added a few more. Unless the FreeBSD community is willing to put forth the same effort, FreeBSD won't ever become a great desktop OS.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Dec 29, 2020)

mintchoco said:


> But I wonder why we need GUI in FreeBSD. CLI is enough for it. Maybe it makes newbies easier to adopt to the system, but there are not much gui software for FreeBSD.


The fact that people want a GUI on FreeBSD shows that CLI isn't enough for it. Though most of us are comfortable with the CLI, it's really an outdated interface. Not everyone wants to be stuck in the 1970s -after all, it's almost 2021. So, a GUI is needed because this is what modern users want.


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## Argentum (Dec 29, 2020)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Unless the FreeBSD community is willing to put forth the same effort, FreeBSD won't ever become a great desktop OS.


Assume that does not mean that one can not build her/his own great desktop with FreeBSD. But they are a minority. For example, I have my own great FreeBSD desktop and I am satisfied, but it would be hard to distribute it for general public use. 

BTW, I have MATE with Cairo-Dock, also some KDE Plasma5 and Gnome3 things in it. 

But yes, an easily configurable general purpose desktop would help to promote the FreeBSD public acceptance.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 29, 2020)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The fact that people want a GUI on FreeBSD shows that CLI isn't enough for it. Though most of us are comfortable with the CLI, it's really an outdated interface. Not everyone wants to be stuck in the 1970s -after all, it's almost 2021. So, a GUI is needed because this is what modern users want.


Thing is most "modern users" have no clue what FreeBSD even is. Linux has a minuscule userbase compared to Windows and Mac, FreeBSD user base (desktop) is certainly even smaller than Linux. Nothing wrong with CLI - it is vastly more powerful than any GUI app out there, although not as user friendly. What is the saying: "Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are?"

I do not believe one of the goals of the FreeBSD foundation is to make FreeBSD more user friendly so it gets adopted as a desktop. They do work towards making modernizations so users can implement KDE, Gnome, etc, but most FreeBSD use is on servers. At least that is my guess.


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## Samuel Venable (Dec 29, 2020)

Well my distro has just begun. One of the biggest set backs causing people to not want to use it atm is you need to backup and replace your default make executable with a symlink to gmake. I am in the process of fixing this and I'm constantly publishing updates to improve user experience and useability.


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## Jose (Dec 29, 2020)

scottro said:


> It gives people with mild curiosity more incentive to see what FreeBSD is. People who don't (yet) want to put much effort into it but might find that they like it...


Let them cut their teeth on Linux.


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## wolffnx (Dec 29, 2020)

I really still dont get it…the search of users for the "big perfect desktop" and how hard is for them

-pkg install xorg
-pkg install (one of many DE o WM)

and ok,you have intel or nvidia
video
search how to install the driver
in FBSD

and done!

there are many file managers,editors,audio players… etc..etc… and that is…a desktop!! 

no need for tuning nothing for "desktop use",maybe the only thing is limit the ZFS ARC size
but nothing more


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## fel1x (Dec 30, 2020)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The fact that people want a GUI on FreeBSD shows that CLI isn't enough for it. Though most of us are comfortable with the CLI, it's really an outdated interface. Not everyone wants to be stuck in the 1970s -after all, it's almost 2021. So, a GUI is needed because this is what modern users want.


For normal users: YES. But FreeBSD is mainly for routers, embedded machines, servers, etc. For them, GUI takes a lot of resource, which means most of them use CLI until now.


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## fel1x (Dec 30, 2020)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> There are thousands of "GUI" applications for FreeBSD. You can run it as a desktop if you'd like. Perhaps that is not your use case?


I mean Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft Office things. Things we can use in real life without changing to other programs such as libre office.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 30, 2020)

mintchoco said:


> I mean Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft Office things. Things we can use in real life without changing to other programs such as libre office.


That has nothing to do with availability. Those are choices. Real life can be accomplished quite well with alternatives. I personally find Microsoft Office to be a steaming heap of crap. I have never and will never buy it. Adobe is the same: bloated, invasive and expensive.


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## diortemew (Dec 30, 2020)

Invasive indeed. You can't do anything with Adobe until you sign up with FB, Google, or personal email. This is when they berate you with notifications and ads. I just tested this. Just to get a banner for this site, I had to register. For a single friggin' banner? It was a really good banner though, but at the cost of my personal information? Bleh!


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## Phishfry (Dec 30, 2020)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Additionally, it allows far too much customization,


Customization is the primary reason I use FreeBSD.
I run FreeBSD on my Firewall. I run FreeBSD on my Wireless Access Point and I run FreeBSD on my Laptop.
I have a home lab with 2 virt servers, 2 storage servers as well a rack full of other servers and cloud instances.
All running the same source code. NanoBSD appliance images are sublime.
FreeBSD is so customizable and that is the main selling point for me.

Anybody that thinks they can do better than core FreeBSD is despondent.
Come aboard the mothership.


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## Argentum (Dec 30, 2020)

mintchoco said:


> For normal users: YES. But FreeBSD is mainly for routers, embedded machines, servers, etc. For them, GUI takes a lot of resource, which means most of them use CLI until now.


Well, personally, that was exactly the story, why I started using FreeBSD as a desktop. Many years ago I installed my first FreeBSD server and after that some other servers, routers and firewalls. Used regular command line for management. But soon I understood, that this is a good idea to keep one FreeBSD machine on my desk just for `ssh`. Some time later, based on my previous experience wit X11, I thought that running X on that machine might be a good idea. Then, after that I wanted better terminal, web browser, mail client, etc...

Meaning, no ready made huge machinery, but just some useful applications with GUI. As I have written before in this forum - for me, the most important function of GUI has been *copy and paste. *And a good *web browser* of course. But not managing this machine with GUI.


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## mickey (Dec 30, 2020)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The fact that people want a GUI on FreeBSD shows that CLI isn't enough for it. Though most of us are comfortable with the CLI, it's really an outdated interface. Not everyone wants to be stuck in the 1970s -after all, it's almost 2021. So, a GUI is needed because this is what modern users want.


That reminds me of what a SUN employee once told me in the 1990s when I asked him why SUN was moving from BSD based SunOS to that SYSV based Solaris crap: "The user does  not want to mess with text based configuration files, the user wants an admin-tool". Well, he couldn't have been more wrong. The power and flexibility that text based configuration files give is still unsurpassed in 2020.


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## kpedersen (Dec 30, 2020)

mintchoco said:


> I mean Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft Office things. Things we can use in real life without changing to other programs such as libre office.


Those terrible "cloud DRM" things should only ever be run in a VM. Even on Windows. FreeBSD offers a wide range of virtualization technology.


mickey said:


> That reminds me of what a SUN employee once told me in the 1990s when I asked him why SUN was moving from BSD based SunOS to that SYSV based Solaris crap: "The user does  not want to mess with text based configuration files, the user wants an admin-tool". Well, he couldn't have been more wrong. The power and flexibility that text based configuration files give is still unsurpassed in 2020.



This is so true. When all is said and done, maintenance and real work is always best done falling back to text files. GUIs go out of date every decade whereas text-files remain timeless (albeit timelessly uncool from a consumers perspective).


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## wolffnx (Dec 30, 2020)

mintchoco said:


> I mean Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft Office things. Things we can use in real life without changing to other programs such as libre office.



Then that user should use windows , maybe could work with wine but is from WINDOWS ecosystem
so...go there and dont complaint about it
one thing is talking about a desktop and another is about comercial closed tools related to one operating
system


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 13, 2021)

Phishfry said:


> Customization is the primary reason I use FreeBSD.
> I run FreeBSD on my Firewall. I run FreeBSD on my Wireless Access Point and I run FreeBSD on my Laptop.
> I have a home lab with 2 virt servers, 2 storage servers as well a rack full of other servers and cloud instances.
> All running the same source code. NanoBSD appliance images are sublime.
> ...


And yet, GhostBSD is positioned to become more widespread than FreeBSD on the desktop. It's providing what users are asking for. The average desktop user isn't using a customized firewall nor access point. They also predominately not running virtual servers, storage servers, any other servers, nor cloud instances. Your use case isn't the use case of the average desktop user. It's not even the average use case for the average computer user, period. You guys are going to have to wake up and realize that the majority of computer users are NOT using computers for what you are using it for. This is why FreeBSD has been losing in the desktop & in getting new tech from hardware vendors -you're actively ignoring users who aren't running servers.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 13, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> Those terrible "cloud DRM" things should only ever be run in a VM. Even on Windows. FreeBSD offers a wide range of virtualization technology.
> 
> 
> This is so true. When all is said and done, maintenance and real work is always best done falling back to text files. GUIs go out of date every decade whereas text-files remain timeless (albeit timelessly uncool from a consumers perspective).


This attitude is why Linux is younger than FreeBSD but has more mindshare than FreeBSD. The majority of the FreeBSD community are actively trying to ignore all other use cases than system admin. Regular users literally don't care about that. Most users aren't using their computers to run servers. Additionally, running servers isn't all that FreeBSD is useful for. People like you are going to cause FreeBSD to become irrelevant. I, for one, definitely don't want to see that happen.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 13, 2021)

mintchoco said:


> For normal users: YES. But FreeBSD is mainly for routers, embedded machines, servers, etc. For them, GUI takes a lot of resource, which means most of them use CLI until now.


NO, FreeBSD is NOT mainly for that. That's where it's mainly being used, but that's not really what it's for. And to be honest, that attitude is what's stopping FreeBSD from being used in a wider range of areas. It's also the reason that certain technologies either suck or don't even exist on FreeBSD -such as Vulkan, Cuda, OpenCL. That's part of the reason that FreeBSD doesn't have a presence in data science, nor supercomputing. Sure, GUIs, use a lot of resources; but in case you haven't heard, this isn't 1994 -computers have a ton of resources now. Don't make excuses for holding back the platform because of your own biases.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 13, 2021)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> Thing is most "modern users" have no clue what FreeBSD even is. Linux has a minuscule userbase compared to Windows and Mac, FreeBSD user base (desktop) is certainly even smaller than Linux. Nothing wrong with CLI - it is vastly more powerful than any GUI app out there, although not as user friendly. What is the saying: "Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are?"
> 
> I do not believe one of the goals of the FreeBSD foundation is to make FreeBSD more user friendly so it gets adopted as a desktop. They do work towards making modernizations so users can implement KDE, Gnome, etc, but most FreeBSD use is on servers. At least that is my guess.


The problem is that the foresight of the FreeBSD foundation is questionable. This is how upstarts such as Linux have been able to eat FreeBSD's lunch & displace it from any form of position of power. At this point, FreeBSD has positioned itself to eat the scraps that Linux produces -including kernel level code for infrastructure & drivers. Most modern users don't know what FreeBSD is simply because the FreeBSD foundation has not really done much to change that. Yet, most modern users do know what Linux is. And many of the ones who don't have at least heard the name before & remember it. My guess is that one of the FreeBSD derivatives is going to completely overshadow it in the coming years. At this point, FreeBSD is not much more than an ingredient for something better.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 13, 2021)

Argentum said:


> Assume that does not mean that one can not build her/his own great desktop with FreeBSD. But they are a minority. For example, I have my own great FreeBSD desktop and I am satisfied, but it would be hard to distribute it for general public use.
> 
> BTW, I have MATE with Cairo-Dock, also some KDE Plasma5 and Gnome3 things in it.
> 
> But yes, an easily configurable general purpose desktop would help to promote the FreeBSD public acceptance.


It takes so much more than 1 person building their own great desktop for an OS to be a great desktop OS. You've definitely hit the nail on the head. An easily configurable general purpose desktop would certainly help to promote the FreeBSD public acceptance. With such a thing in tow, they could see the overall user base jump drastically in the coming years.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 13, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The problem is that the foresight of the FreeBSD foundation is questionable. This is how upstarts such as Linux have been able to eat FreeBSD's lunch & displace it from any form of position of power. At this point, FreeBSD has positioned itself to eat the scraps that Linux produces -including kernel level code for infrastructure & drivers. Most modern users don't know what FreeBSD is simply because the FreeBSD foundation has not really done much to change that. Yet, most modern users do know what Linux is. And many of the ones who don't have at least heard the name before & remember it. My guess is that one of the FreeBSD derivatives is going to completely overshadow it in the coming years. At this point, FreeBSD is not much more than an ingredient for something better.


Maybe it’s me but I don’t see this as a competition.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 13, 2021)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> Maybe it’s me but I don’t see this as a competition.


Which is exactly why FBSD is falling behind.


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## Phishfry (Jan 13, 2021)

I love that I can build a kiosk with Xorg and OpenBox from the same source code as your average desktop setup..

I mean how hard is a FreeBSD desktop? `pkg install xfce4` and use a framebuffer driver to start.
I really don't understand why people have problems with video setup.
scfb and vesa are baked in and work well enough to get you started.


But I think that I would best describe FreeBSD as a Power User' OS.
Call me a power user .



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> you're actively ignoring users who aren't running servers.


That is not how I see it. The project is small and has limited resources. People only work on what they want.
Nearly everybody is a volunteer. True we have a small user base. You can only herd the cats. There is no kernel boss or distro chief. It is a core team. Some of these people come from industry and have projects.

Many of us here are veteran computer users. We have passed through many operating systems before settling on FreeBSD.
We have some pretty rugged Free software too.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 13, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Which is exactly why FBSD is falling behind.


Incredible. It's like you've done absolutely no research on the situation. Do you even bother to challenge your assumptions? Or why things are the way they are?


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## Snurg (Jan 13, 2021)

Even Microsoft needed more than half a decade and bury many millions until users finally began to slowly accept their "cheap MacOS copy".
May I ask, has any FOSS OS or distro which is aligned to a particular DE ever survived for long?


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 13, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Which is exactly why FBSD is falling behind.


My point is there is no “falling behind” because it’s not a competition.


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## kpedersen (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Which is exactly why FBSD is falling behind.


FreeBSD has apparently been "falling behind" for decades and yet... well, it is still pretty darn competitive isn't it? Otherwise you wouldn't even be on these forums.

All of that effort that Linux has made to be user friendly has made such a little dent in the consumer desktop market. If those efforts were spent elsewhere, Linux would be vastly superior to FreeBSD.

Twiddling with desktop themes and making fun little installers is not a good investment in time. Especially when they don't improve the OS in any meaningful way. The fact that these forks like TrueOS, FuryBSD, DesktopBSD and others consistently seem to fail as projects should start to become good evidence for this.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> This attitude is why Linux is younger than FreeBSD but has more mindshare than FreeBSD.



iPhones are younger than Linux and have more mindshare. That doesn't make them something that Linux should aspire to be. And when Linux does inevitably go that route (mobile and cloud), FreeBSD will always be available to you as a stable sane platform to fall back on to get some work done.

Don't get me wrong though, FreeBSD isn't perfect. The project needs more skilled developers to work on drivers for new hardware. Unfortunately the OS is tied to physical metal which needs to be kept up to date. Those kinds of developer are also *much* harder to find than those who can customise UIs. I also believe this skillset is shrinking in the industry as people are losing touch with the lower levels of operating systems. This is the #1 threat to all free operating systems (and interestingly, looking at OpenBSD it seems it isn't even tied to popularity or userbase. They do very well even with a much smaller userbase than FreeBSD.)


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

Fighting for the desktop in 2021 is a fool's errand. The desktop is disappearing. The predominant mode of computer use for the vast majority of humanity is the mobile phone.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 14, 2021)

No way. I will never abandon a desktop if they are available. Phones are handy but useless for anything remotely resembling work.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

Oh me neither, but we're going to be living next to each other a good ways down the "long tail".


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> It's providing what users are asking for.


There are many different users of computers. FreeBSD serves a certain set of users really well ... for example the NetApp, Juniper and NetFlix set. It serves another set of users pretty well (server users), although there the numbers are tiny compared to Linux. You correctly point out that judging by the user response, FreeBSD doesn't serve desktop users very much. OK, that's a fact.



> This is why FreeBSD has been losing in the desktop & in getting new tech from hardware vendors -you're actively ignoring users who aren't running servers.


You say this as if it were a bad thing. Maybe it is a good thing? Maybe FreeBSD is not interesting in serving the desktop?



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> This attitude is why Linux is younger than FreeBSD but has more mindshare than FreeBSD.


Much more important than mindshare is market share. Let's see: Among supercomputers (for example the Top500 list), Linux' market share is 100%. Not a joke: there is no single supercomputer running an OS other than Linux on the list of the largest 500 publicly known ones. Among servers, there are de-facto only two OSes: Linux and Windows. We can argue whether the split between them is 70:30, 60:40, or 80:20, and which direction it is (I think it is 80% Linux, 20% Windows), but all other server OSes (like FreeBSD, AIX, zOS, HP-UX, NonStop, Solaris...) are at the percent level or below.

Among desktop users, the Linux marketshare is probably about 2% (the remainder is Windows and MacOS). And desktop OSes are rapidly vanishing compared to mobile OSes (iOS, Android, ...). You are upset that the FreeBSD market share on the desktop is tiny compared to Linux. You are overlooking that it is a tiny market share of a vanishingly small addressable market. Even if FreeBSD managed to split the FOSS desktop market 50:50 with Linux, it would still be irrelevant at the big scale.

Face it: Only a few crazy hobbyists want to run FreeBSD on the desktop. And it makes a fun hobby, because it is so charmingly difficult. I see it as something like sport sailing (small sailboats): Not a practical means of transportation, but a great way to to spend every evening tinkering with a project, and then going really fast in circles on the weekend, while getting soaking wet and bitterly cold.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> NO, FreeBSD is NOT mainly for that. That's where it's mainly being used, but that's not really what it's for.


Sorry to be blunt: You have no idea what FreeBSD is for. And your opinion of what it should be is irrelevant.
To be honest: I also have no idea what FreeBSD is for. I find that it is very useful for what I like to use it for (a small server). I don't try to use it for something that it would predictably be bad at.

Now, you are perfectly free to ask the people who set the direction of FreeBSD what it is intended for (Kirk, Justin, George, ...). While I've talked to quite a few of them, I've never asked such a dumb question.



Jose said:


> Fighting for the desktop in 2021 is a fool's errand. The desktop is disappearing. The predominant mode of computer use for the vast majority of humanity is the mobile phone.


THIS. You get it. Desktops (including laptops) have a shrinking share of machines for using information. And people who install/configure/maintain their own desktops are a tiny fraction. Nearly everyone uses a computer as an appliance: You buy it at a store, it has a working OS on it, it gets upgraded (today that's nearly completely automatic), and there is no need to make decisions. And they work exceedingly well, with very little effort.


----------



## Argentum (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> There are many different users of computers. FreeBSD serves a certain set of users really well ... for example the NetApp, Juniper and NetFlix set. It serves another set of users pretty well (server users), although there the numbers are tiny compared to Linux. You correctly point out that judging by the user response, FreeBSD doesn't serve desktop users very much. OK, that's a fact.


Agree, but not completely. I think I am one example of a rare case who thinks FreeBSD desktop is a best possible solution. I have a windows machine, but do not want or like to use it. The question here its not only GUI, but also the OS behind it, ZFS, etc. Actually, GUI-s are not FreeBSD. I have several GUI-s installed on the same machine for different moods - MATE, KDE Plasma5 and Xfce. But using GUI does not mean using the OS (at least for me) and this is where Windows and many Linux distros fail. Many people just do not use the OS, but only GUI and some desktop applications. Web browser for example. My Firefox and Chromium are working very well on this FreeBSD machine, also my Thunderbird and other desktop applications I am using. Another story is, what applications are availabe...


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## a6h (Jan 14, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> Those terrible "cloud DRM" things should only ever be run in a VM. Even on Windows.





A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> This attitude is why Linux is younger than FreeBSD but has more mindshare than FreeBSD.


DRM itself is the problem. The solution is to get rid of DRM, not to enable it. Therefore I agree with kpedersen, It belongs to VM.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Most modern users don't know [...]


Could you please, define the "Modern User"? Anyway, I'm anti-modernity, thus you can completely ignore my question.


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## Snurg (Jan 14, 2021)

In addition to what Argentum said: I hate DM's, they are just annoying.
I mean, I only slap my personal fvwm config files over xorg install and I am ready to go.
No annoying icons, bars, blinking stuff, animations and all that crap which normies like.

(You know, I am just a incurable nerdy ADHD retard. And I get the more aggro the more useless fancy stuff I am forced to see/bear. Modern Windows, MacOS and DEs are unbearable for me just because of that. Sorry...)


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## matt_k (Jan 14, 2021)

I feel like a naysayer, but I still think, that making FreeBSD more "user friendly" is trying just to solve a problem that does not exist. FreeBSD is very user friendly, by being simple and well-documented. It is not a point-and-click type of OS and that's precisely the point. There are enough *buntu clones already, I don't see any point in making another one by introducing Fury/GhostBSD.


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## a6h (Jan 14, 2021)

On usage statistics, i.e. (Linux > FreeBSD):
A group of people love to ask this question: why Linux went up, and FreeBSD didn't, 80s I suppose!
Then, there's another group, trying to rationalise the situation. I've heard the stories. court, UNIX, phone number, etc.
I prefer to go with Black Swan theory (Nicholas Taleb). I think Linux happened, because things happen. Random things happen. A mini/semi version of Black Swan.


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## Snurg (Jan 14, 2021)

matt_k said:


> FreeBSD is very user friendly, by being simple and well-documented. It is not a point-and-click type of OS and that's precisely the point.


I recently again used Linux (Debian) for a longer while for my desktop, because of its hibernate capability.
But it is not at all user friendly... systemd and the general mess... well my masochism has some limits.

What I just don't understand is why the guys don't make good postinstallers for FreeBSD that make it easy for casual users to set up a working office or multimedia box in a snap.
Why do they have to name/market an install batch for some DE as a something (for the ignorant) apparently completely independent "OS"?
So many examples, from PC-BSD to GhostBSD or whatever.
I just don't understand it, this is foreign to me.


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## Argentum (Jan 14, 2021)

Snurg said:


> What I just don't understand is why the guys don't make good postinstallers for FreeBSD that make it easy for casual users to set up a working office or multimedia box in a snap.
> Why do they have to name/market an install batch for some DE as a something (for the ignorant) apparently completely independent "OS"?


This is an interesting question because there are no such '_guys'_ who can answer this. Many people have done a great job developing different parts of this Operating System, but obviously they have no resources and maybe even skills to work on (yet)another Window Manager. Different WM communities have also done a great job, but they are not directly linked to the FreeBSD project. 

Personally I think that it is better to have good building blocks (read OS, WM, browser, etc.), rather than everything glued together and forced on user (like in Windows). I think this is the weakest and most annoying point in Windows that OS is inseparable of User Interface. I like the freedom that I can select the UI I like, but not to be married with it.


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## Argentum (Jan 14, 2021)

vigole said:


> On usage statistics, i.e. (Linux > FreeBSD):
> A group of people love to ask this question: why Linux went up, and FreeBSD didn't, 80s I suppose!
> Then, there's another group, trying to rationalise the situation. I've heard the stories. court, UNIX, phone number, etc.
> I prefer to go with Black Swan theory (Nicholas Taleb). I think Linux happened, because things happen. Random things happen. A mini/semi version of Black Swan.


To be correct, Linux did not start on 80's, but (according to Wikipedia) on 1991. Personally I installed my first public Internet server on 1995 and my first attempt was on Linux. *It was a complete crap!* Fortunately I understood within a week that I should remove the Linux and install everything on FreeBSD. 

But why did I install the Linux first? Just because I got the installation media from somewhere. Why did I move to FreeBSD then? Because I had UNIX and BSD experience almost 10 years by then. But I think most people did not have any UNIX experience before and when they landed on Linux, they just stayed there. They had no comparison.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> The predominant mode of computer use for the vast majority of humanity is the mobile phone.


This is truth.


vigole said:


> why Linux went up, and FreeBSD didn't


Most Linux' distros target the average user. FreeBSD does not target the average user. There are far more average users today.



Snurg said:


> why the guys don't make good postinstallers for FreeBSD that make it easy for casual users


1) It takes developers away from work that needs to be done on the core system.
2) Casual users are not FreeBSD's prime target.

Nobody complains about Amazon, IBM, Microsoft servers and Oracle not making their machines and software easier for the casual user.


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## wolffnx (Jan 14, 2021)

Snurg said:


> What I just don't understand is why the guys don't make good postinstallers for FreeBSD that make it easy for casual users to set up a working office or multimedia box in a snap.
> Why do they have to name/market an install batch for some DE as a something (for the ignorant) apparently completely independent "OS"?
> So many examples, from PC-BSD to GhostBSD or whatever.
> I just don't understand it, this is foreign to me.


because dont need to, besides if the instalacion was for a desktop user o server is just fine

fbsd (in my personal opinion)
follow the KISS ideology
in times where everything its become the oposite of that
and everything works as expected
and that will not change for follow the tendencies,the sheeps..etc

you have a machine and use a local operating system,nothing more
and expect that FreeBSD dont change that actitude


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Phishfry said:


> That is not how I see it. The project is small and has limited resources. People only work on what they want.
> Nearly everybody is a volunteer. True we have a small user base. You can only herd the cats. There is no kernel boss or distro chief. It is a core team. Some of these people come from industry and have projects.
> 
> Many of us here are veteran computer users. We have passed through many operating systems before settling on FreeBSD.
> We have some pretty rugged Free software too.




I've been a BSD user since the late 1990s, so I know the general makeup of the community. The fact remains that the community vehemently rejects the mere mention of changes that improve the usability of the system as a desktop OS, as this very forum thread has already proven.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> Incredible. It's like you've done absolutely no research on the situation. Do you even bother to challenge your assumptions? Or why things are the way they are?


Actually, I've been a FBSD user since the late 1990s. I've literally watched it happen. These aren't assumptions, & I already know why things are the way they are.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> My point is there is no “falling behind” because it’s not a competition.


Yeh, that's what people who've lost generally say...


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## shkhln (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Actually, I've been a FBSD user since the late 1990s. I've literally watched it happen.


Watching development from the sidelines? You only got yourself to blame then.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> FreeBSD has apparently been "falling behind" for decades and yet... well, it is still pretty darn competitive isn't it? Otherwise you wouldn't even be on these forums.


Actually, it's not very competitive. I'm on these forums to address issues. When I first started with FreeBSD, it WAS competitive. That was long before I joined the forum. I'm definitely not here as much as I used to be.


kpedersen said:


> All of that effort that Linux has made to be user friendly has made such a little dent in the consumer desktop market. If those efforts were spent elsewhere, Linux would be vastly superior to FreeBSD.


It still has made a much larger dent on the desktop than FreeBSD has. And honestly, the fact that FreeBSD is now importing Linux code means that Linux has already surpassed FreeBSD. Its a harsh reality, but it's reality all the same.


kpedersen said:


> Twiddling with desktop themes and making fun little installers is not a good investment in time. Especially when they don't improve the OS in any meaningful way. The fact that these forks like TrueOS, FuryBSD, DesktopBSD and others consistently seem to fail as projects should start to become good evidence for this.


The majority of the Linux community doesn't do that. Additionally, each of those projects failed for different reasons -none of which have anything to do with desktops & themes. Nice try, though.


kpedersen said:


> iPhones are younger than Linux and have more mindshare. That doesn't make them something that Linux should aspire to be. And when Linux does inevitably go that route (mobile and cloud), FreeBSD will always be available to you as a stable sane platform to fall back on to get some work done.


The Linux kernel is already competing in that space & is actually doing very well -or have you not ever heard of Android?


kpedersen said:


> Don't get me wrong though, FreeBSD isn't perfect. The project needs more skilled developers to work on drivers for new hardware. Unfortunately the OS is tied to physical metal which needs to be kept up to date. Those kinds of developer are also *much* harder to find than those who can customise UIs. I also believe this skillset is shrinking in the industry as people are losing touch with the lower levels of operating systems. This is the #1 threat to all free operating systems (and interestingly, looking at OpenBSD it seems it isn't even tied to popularity or userbase. They do very well even with a much smaller userbase than FreeBSD.)


Honestly, that's a very lazy argument. There seems to be no shortage of such individuals to work on the Linux kernel. The fact of the matter is that such people are actively choosing to work on various aspects of Linux instead of various aspects of FreeBSD. And though many companies would rather choose BSD-licensed code over GPL-licensed code, the majority of them are STILL choosing to improve the conditions of the Linux community, rather than improve the conditions of any of the BSD communities.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> There are many different users of computers. FreeBSD serves a certain set of users really well ... for example the NetApp, Juniper and NetFlix set. It serves another set of users pretty well (server users), although there the numbers are tiny compared to Linux. You correctly point out that judging by the user response, FreeBSD doesn't serve desktop users very much. OK, that's a fact.


That's the point. There're desktop users asking to be better supported by FBSD & before the developers can even say anything, the community itself is rejecting them. None of the BSD communities are in any position to reject users.


ralphbsz said:


> You say this as if it were a bad thing. Maybe it is a good thing? Maybe FreeBSD is not interesting in serving the desktop?


If that were true, then there wouldn't be desktop software in ports, nor would there be desktop packages. Additionally, the core team wouldn't be importing Linux code into the repository.


ralphbsz said:


> Much more important than mindshare is market share. Let's see: Among supercomputers (for example the Top500 list), Linux' market share is 100%. Not a joke: there is no single supercomputer running an OS other than Unix on the list of the largest 500 publicly known ones. Among servers, there are de-facto only two OSes: Linux and Windows. We can argue whether the split between them is 70:30, 60:40, or 80:20, and which direction it is (I think it is 80% Linux, 20% Windows), but all other server OSes (like FreeBSD, AIX, zOS, HP-UX, NonStop, Solaris...) are at the percent level or below.


You can't get marketshare without mindshare. There's a reason that FBSD isn't present in the HPC market -no one wants to port any of the necessary software to FBSD. In fact, Plan9 has better support on supercomputers than FBSD. Perhaps you should ask yourself why that is.


ralphbsz said:


> Among desktop users, the Linux marketshare is probably about 2% (the remainder is Windows and MacOS). And desktop OSes are rapidly vanishing compared to mobile OSes (iOS, Android, ...). You are upset that the FreeBSD market share on the desktop is tiny compared to Linux. You are overlooking that it is a tiny market share of a vanishingly small addressable market. Even if FreeBSD managed to split the FOSS desktop market 50:50 with Linux, it would still be irrelevant at the big scale.


Desktop OSes aren't going anywhere. Markets can only hold 3 leaders. The desktop is no different. Right now, those 3 leaders are Windows, Mac, & Linux. There aren't many mobile OSes, & their growth is purely in the mobile space. Mobile OSes aren't replacing desktop OSes. Additionally, it's entirely possible for FBSD to get about 2% of the market. It's not even the developers rejecting the desktop.


ralphbsz said:


> Face it: Only a few crazy hobbyists want to run FreeBSD on the desktop. And it makes a fun hobby, because it is so charmingly difficult. I see it as something like sport sailing (small sailboats): Not a practical means of transportation, but a great way to to spend every evening tinkering with a project, and then going really fast in circles on the weekend, while getting soaking wet and bitterly cold.


That's false. A person isn't crazy for using a system on the desktop when there are desktop packages that are officially distributed. Try again.


ralphbsz said:


> Sorry to be blunt: You have no idea what FreeBSD is for. And your opinion of what it should be is irrelevant.
> To be honest: I also have no idea what FreeBSD is for. I find that it is very useful for what I like to use it for (a small server). I don't try to use it for something that it would predictably be bad at.


I'm going to be just as blunt as you are. Unless you started using FBSD before 1997, then YOU have no idea of what it's for. Mind you, that's when I started using it, but I became aware of it in 1995. That's 2 years after it was first released. As for my opinion of what it's for, my opinion is that there should be more support for what it claims to offer -which is true of ANY product. Times are changing. Anything that can't adapt to change is destined to die off.


ralphbsz said:


> Now, you are perfectly free to ask the people who set the direction of FreeBSD what it is intended for (Kirk, Justin, George, ...). While I've talked to quite a few of them, I've never asked such a dumb question.


Labeling a question as dumb just because you disagree with it is intellectually dishonest, & most certainly ignorant.


ralphbsz said:


> THIS. You get it. Desktops (including laptops) have a shrinking share of machines for using information. And people who install/configure/maintain their own desktops are a tiny fraction. Nearly everyone uses a computer as an appliance: You buy it at a store, it has a working OS on it, it gets upgraded (today that's nearly completely automatic), and there is no need to make decisions. And they work exceedingly well, with very little effort.


This argument is broken. Desktop computers can be bought with Linux pre-installed. This should be possible with FBSD, but the community is the problem. Likely, FBSD will be surpassed by GhostBSD.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

vigole said:


> DRM itself is the problem. The solution is to get rid of DRM, not to enable it. Therefore I agree with kpedersen, It belongs to VM.
> 
> 
> Could you please, define the "Modern User"? Anyway, I'm anti-modernity, thus you can completely ignore my question.


Absolutely none of this has anything to do with the fact that desktop users would like to use FBSD as a desktop system, without having to fight the OS to do things that it can supposedly do. Also, modern users are users who aren't stuck in the 1970s, in terms of how to interact with computers.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Argentum said:


> This is an interesting question because there are no such '_guys'_ who can answer this. Many people have done a great job developing different parts of this Operating System, but obviously they have no resources and maybe even skills to work on (yet)another Window Manager. Different WM communities have also done a great job, but they are not directly linked to the FreeBSD project.
> 
> Personally I think that it is better to have good building blocks (read OS, WM, browser, etc.), rather than everything glued together and forced on user (like in Windows). I think this is the weakest and most annoying point in Windows that OS is inseparable of User Interface. I like the freedom that I can select the UI I like, but not to be married with it.


The fact of the matter is that FBSD rejects this notion because the community thinks that it's command line installer is good enough. Decades ago, it WAS good enough. Today, it's crap. It's been crap for a very long time. Graphical installers have been created, but FBSD couldn't be bothered to use them. PC-BSD had one. GhostBSD has one.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

vigole said:


> On usage statistics, i.e. (Linux > FreeBSD):
> A group of people love to ask this question: why Linux went up, and FreeBSD didn't, 80s I suppose!
> Then, there's another group, trying to rationalise the situation. I've heard the stories. court, UNIX, phone number, etc.
> I prefer to go with Black Swan theory (Nicholas Taleb). I think Linux happened, because things happen. Random things happen. A mini/semi version of Black Swan.


It's already been documented why Linux happened. Linux specifically said that if the AT&T vs BSD court case hadn't happened, he would've never written Linux. That's straight from the horse's mouth. It's not a random thing. Even the court case wasn't a random thing. The BSDs did nothing to get themselves over the stench that the court case cast upon them. None of them did anything to improve their image. Even simple things, such as improve their installer. They did nothing to make their system welcoming to new users. As a result, new users went to Linux -which actively recruited users.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Actually, I've been a FBSD user since the late 1990s. I've literally watched it happen. These aren't assumptions, & I already know why things are the way they are.


If you've been watching it's development since the 90's, you would understand the status quo with regards to the desktop. You have no one to blame but yourself. Your disappointment is simply misplaced.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

It seems to be the FBSD community's position that rejecting the average user is a successful approach. This is a failed strategy that continues to fail each decade.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> If you've been watching it's development since the 90's, you would understand the status quo with regards to the desktop. You have no one to blame but yourself. Your disappointment is simply misplaced.


"Status quo" isn't synonymous with "correct path forward". And just so you know, the community wasn't always this blockheaded. Try again.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> There seems to be no shortage of such individuals to work on the Linux kernel. The fact of the matter is that such people are actively choosing to work on various aspects of Linux instead of various aspects of FreeBSD.


The vast majority of people contributing to Linux are employees who do so as their job. Intel, IBM, Oracle, RedHat, Microsoft, Samsung, Suse, and so on. Which makes sense: they all use huge quantities of Linux (mostly servers, but some companies use Linux machines as desktops too), so both large users and companies in the computer industry contribute to Linux. Not out of charity, but to develop the things they need, or which enables their sales. Several of these companies have hundreds of people working on nothing other than Linux development (it might be thousands at the largest ones).

In contrast, FreeBSD is mostly developed by volunteers who are not paid; I think the total number of fulltime paid FreeBSD developers can be counted on fingers. The rest is done by volunteers. And volunteers will work on whatever volunteers want to work on. If you order a volunteer who is interested in kernel code or low-level utilities to work on GUI or DE instead, they'll probably just stop working on FreeBSD.

Given the small number of developers, it makes sense to focus on the core: the base OS (kernel and core utilities), and easy/convenient configurability.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> "Status quo" isn't synonymous with "correct path forward". And just so you know, the community wasn't always this blockheaded. Try again.


My point is that you're sticking your head in the sand as to why FreeBSD hasn't been on "the correct path" in terms of using the desktop. It's simply willful naivety at best. Do you realize how incredibly hard it is to write graphics drivers? Or how difficult it is incorporate API/ABI stability if the committers were to ship X11 by default? Or how much work is involved with providing a usable toolkit that's not filled without Linuxisms? Considering FreeBSD's historical target audience; it would be a zero sum game.

The developers have actually made good strides to get pretty important things working; namely DRM in base, and Linuxulator improvements. Again, you have no one to blame but yourself. If you're not satisfied with how FreeBSD isn't following your ideological trajectory; YOU can start by contributing to the cause.


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## kpedersen (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> or have you not ever heard of Android?


That's like saying FreeBSD is used everywhere because it runs on the PS4.

These "bastardised" versions of a free OS do not benefit anyone and don't really have a bearing on what is good engineering.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> And honestly, the fact that FreeBSD is now importing Linux code means that Linux has already surpassed FreeBSD. Its a harsh reality, but it's reality all the same.


It works both ways. Linux imports many things from the BSDs. sudo, openssh, zfs and a number of drivers. You will notice that Linux must display that classic Berkley license notice? (I know that must upset a lot of zealots!)

Linux does focus on graphics (much to the detriment of other areas). So FreeBSD is pulling that work in (with a lot of manpower and effort). However unlike Linux, graphics does not rule us. For many, it could be stripped out. Notice some of it is in ports and not even in the kernel? We have very few drivers that do that, showing low priority. Same reason why xorg isn't in base.

You may also know that drivers aren't something that can simply be "taken". They often need complete reengineering to integrate with a completely different kernel. Many drivers that people *think* FreeBSD takes are really just integer constants from Linux header files, originally reverse engineered due to lack of correct documentation. Lack of technical knowledge drives this silly Linux rumour. If Windows had a culture of open-source drivers, both Linux and FreeBSD would be "taking" drivers from Windows. Would that make Windows superior?



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> each of those projects failed for different reasons -none of which have anything to do with desktops & themes. Nice try, though.


Why do you think they always fail? If they provided anything meaningful (other than themes of course).



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Markets can only hold 3 leaders. The desktop is no different. Right now, those 3 leaders are Windows, Mac, & Linux


3... why? Is that how many cats you have? Which hole did you pull that number from? Were you around in the UNIX wars? How many leaders were there then?

And Phones? Android, iOS.... What is the 3rd? Windows phone?



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Also, modern users are users who aren't stuck in the 1970s, in terms of how to interact with computers.



So basically not a useful market for an alternative operating system. Windows and macOS are great products for them.


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## SirDice (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> I'm on these forums to address issues.


Wrong place.









						Why is FreeBSD not (more) like ....
					

As of today, FreeBSD Forums staff will actively close down (and eventually remove) topics that serve no other purpose than to complain that "FreeBSD is not (like) Linux" (or Windows, or MacOS, or any other operating system), or that "FreeBSD does not use systemd", or that "FreeBSD has no default...




					forums.freebsd.org


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## a6h (Jan 14, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Nobody complains about Amazon, IBM, Microsoft servers and Oracle not making their machines and software easier for the casual user.


That's correct. In case of Microsoft, just take PowerShell for example. It's a heavenly nightmare. Good luck with finding your way through: regedit.exe, secpol.msc, gpedit.msc, etc.



Argentum said:


> To be correct, Linux did not start on 80's, but (according to Wikipedia) on 1991.


Thanks for correction.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Also, modern users are users who aren't stuck in the 1970s,


Fair enough.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> It seems to be the FBSD community's position that rejecting the average user is a successful approach. This is a failed strategy that continues to fail each decade.


You seem to think that FreeBSD is failing. I very much disagree. I think it is succeeding spectacularly. It creates a reliable, well-built, easy-to-use OS, with some of the best file system technology (UFS and ZFS) out there. The system is stable from release to release, has good support for common hardware (x86 in 32- and 64-bit mode and common interfaces), and is super easy to maintain and upgrade. It makes for an excellent server.

Clearly, hardware support for display hardware is not something the volunteers are terribly interested in. And GUI/DE stuff gets minimal effort, fundamentally just lightweight porting of things that are developed on and for Linux. If that bothers you, then stop using it for GUI/DE purposes. Or volunteer to fix it: Quit your day job, and start working fulltime on it.


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## ProphetOfDoom (Jan 14, 2021)

I often wonder what people who are furious about the market share of operating systems would be like if they had something real to be angry about. It’s a scary thought.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> The vast majority of people contributing to Linux are employees who do so as their job. Intel, IBM, Oracle, RedHat, Microsoft, Samsung, Suse, and so on. Which makes sense: they all use huge quantities of Linux (mostly servers, but some companies use Linux machines as desktops too), so both large users and companies in the computer industry contribute to Linux. Not out of charity, but to develop the things they need, or which enables their sales. Several of these companies have hundreds of people working on nothing other than Linux development (it might be thousands at the largest ones).
> 
> In contrast, FreeBSD is mostly developed by volunteers who are not paid; I think the total number of fulltime paid FreeBSD developers can be counted on fingers. The rest is done by volunteers. And volunteers will work on whatever volunteers want to work on. If you order a volunteer who is interested in kernel code or low-level utilities to work on GUI or DE instead, they'll probably just stop working on FreeBSD.
> 
> Given the small number of developers, it makes sense to focus on the core: the base OS (kernel and core utilities), and easy/convenient configurability.


Which further disproves your assertion of the lack of such developers. The problem is exactly what I said it was -the FBSD community is running off such people, instead of recruiting & welcoming them.


----------



## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

The amount of disrespect towards the developers is astonishing.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> My point is that you're sticking your head in the sand as to why FreeBSD hasn't been on "the correct path" in terms of using the desktop. It's simply willful naivety at best. Do you realize how incredibly hard it is to write graphics drivers? Or how difficult it is incorporate API/ABI stability if the committers were to ship X11 by default? Or how much work is involved with providing a usable toolkit that's not filled without Linuxisms? Considering FreeBSD's historical target audience; it would be a zero sum game.


No, my head isn't in the sand. You're merely making excuses for poor execution. And yes, I know how hard it is to write those drivers. I also know that there was a point where the Linux & FBSD communities shared a common DRM tree. What happened? The FBSD part of the tree fell behind. And now, years later, the OS is behind & is playing catch up...rather unsuccessfully.


Beastie7 said:


> The developers have actually made good strides to get pretty important things working; namely DRM in base, and Linuxulator improvements. Again, you have no one to blame but yourself. If you're not satisfied with how FreeBSD isn't following your ideological trajectory; YOU can start by contributing to the cause.


In reality, what they've done is import Linux code & started trying to duct tape it into working. Considering what the FBSD community has turned into, I'd honestly rather contribute to GhostBSD.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> The amount of disrespect towards the developers is astonishing.


The disrespect isn't for the developers, its for the rest of the community. It's not the developers who're trying to shut down any form of discussion about GUIs, it's the community. So, no I'm not blaming the developers -I'm explicitly blaming the community.


----------



## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> I'd honestly rather contribute to GhostBSD.


You realize GhostBSD IS FreeBSD, right? What they do rests on the hands and work of the FreeBSD committers. Saying FreeBSD is dead because they're not following your idea of where the project should go; you're shitting on the hard work they've put in. I don't think anyone here is advocating against an OOTB experiene with FreeBSD. We're simply telling you why that hasn't been the case, and why it's a difficult task to execute. You can start showing some respect by congradulating the developers on getting DRM et. al. into base, then make your contributions.


----------



## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> It's already been documented why Linux happened. Linux specifically said that if the AT&T vs BSD court case hadn't happened, he would've never written Linux. That's straight from the horse's mouth.


Yes, we've heard that. I went drinking beer with Linus a few times in the mid- and late 90s (before he moved to the US, before he had kids, matter-of-fact before he even had a steady girlfriend). Just like many others, Linus had hardware that was capable of running a real operating system (a 386), and couldn't find a good free operating system. I was in the same situation in the early 90s; I tried buying BSDi (386BSD was not ready to be installed yet), but there was a series of problems that prevented me getting BSD (biggest one: incompatibility with hardware, both networking and display). So I installed Linux on my server at home around 93 or so.

But you seem to think that the current decision of what direction Linux proceeds in is made by Linus. Nothing could be further from the truth. Linus himself is a minor contributor to the source code. There is 1 Linus Torvalds, and there are thousands of Linux developers who work for Intel or IBM.



> The BSDs did nothing to get themselves over the stench that the court case cast upon them. None of them did anything to improve their image. Even simple things, such as improve their installer. They did nothing to make their system welcoming to new users.


Sorry, that's bullshit. You seem to think that the direction of Linux is set by individual users. That's utter nonsense. Users use the system, they don't develop it. Some users like it so much, they graduate to be developers and contributors. But those are not really relevant. What really matters is something like the CEO of IBM deciding that Linux is a strategic asset, and investing a few hundred people (a hundred developers and the various support roles) into making Linux more usable for IBM (feel free to substitute Intel or Oracle or ... for IBM in this example). Or a company like RedHat or Suse deciding to take a few dozen M$ of venture capital investment and making a go of being a Linux contributor and distributor. And you can be sure that the CEO of IBM (or Intel or a VC ...) will not be swayed by a more comfortable installer. They have staff, they look at numbers, they look at strategy and market.

Installer and the "stench of the lawsuit" (which BSD won overwhelmingly) have nothing to do with it. Your mistake is that you think that your personal experience (as an individual amateur desktop user) is relevant to the big picture. It is not. 99% of all computers in the world that run Linux do not have a desktop (they are servers!), and the vast majority of Linux desktops are being used in a corporate setting.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> That's like saying FreeBSD is used everywhere because it runs on the PS4.


Not really. FreeBSD is an entire OS. Linux is only a kernel. Also, PS4 isn't used everywhere. But more importantly, I never made reference to ANYTHING being used everywhere -those were YOUR words. You're attempting to make an argument against something that I've never said. That's intellectually dishonest.


kpedersen said:


> These "bastardised" versions of a free OS do not benefit anyone and don't really have a bearing on what is good engineering.


There's nothing bastardized about android. This isn't even remotely a good argument. Additionally, good engineering doesn't include importing supposedly bad engineering into your own repository.


kpedersen said:


> It works both ways. Linux imports many things from the BSDs. sudo, openssh, zfs and a number of drivers. You will notice that Linux must display that classic Berkley license notice? (I know that must upset a lot of zealots!)


Is that your argument? Linux does it too? Well, how's that working out for Linux & how's it working out for FBSD?


kpedersen said:


> Linux does focus on graphics (much to the detriment of other areas). So FreeBSD is pulling that work in (with a lot of manpower and effort). However unlike Linux, graphics does not rule us. For many, it could be stripped out. Notice some of it is in ports and not even in the kernel? We have very few drivers that do that, showing low priority. Same reason why xorg isn't in base.


On the desktop, graphics are far more important than on the server. So, in order to compete on the desktop, graphics are extremely necessary. So, it's not a matter of being "ruled". The fact of the matter is that stripping out graphics isn't going to fly on a desktop, for the same reason that DOS isn't popular on desktops.


kpedersen said:


> You may also know that drivers aren't something that can simply be "taken". They often need complete reengineering to integrate with a completely different kernel. Many drivers that people *think* FreeBSD takes are really just integer constants from Linux header files, originally reverse engineered due to lack of correct documentation. Lack of technical knowledge drives this silly Linux rumour. If Windows had a culture of open-source drivers, both Linux and FreeBSD would be "taking" drivers from Windows. Would that make Windows superior?


Actually, the developers that first tried to report DRM attempted to re-engineer them. It didn't work...at all. In fact, the effort was tried numerous times, & subsequently scrapped numerous times. Eventually, the decision made was to change as little code as possible & just write a Linux-style wrapper around the DRM code. What's ironic is that none of them stopped to think about what type of driver architecture would make the most sense for FBSD, itself & just write that. DRM is precisely the result of deciding what type of driver architecture would be best for Linux.


kpedersen said:


> Why do you think they always fail? If they provided anything meaningful (other than themes of course).


I know exactly why they failed. And they don't always fail, because there are other projects that are still going.


kpedersen said:


> 3... why? Is that how many cats you have? Which hole did you pull that number from? Were you around in the UNIX wars? How many leaders were there then?


I don't have any cats. It's 3 because market conditions will only allow 3. That's basic business knowledge. The fact that you don't know this is alarming. The Unix wars proves my point. Where are all of those Unix vendors at now? What you fail to realize is that only ONE Unix style system could come out on top. Linux killed them all, but the truth is that FreeBSD should've been left standing on top.


kpedersen said:


> And Phones? Android, iOS.... What is the 3rd? Windows phone?


For a while, yes it was windows phone.


kpedersen said:


> So basically not a useful market for an alternative operating system. Windows and macOS are great products for them.


The alternative OS that should be standing on the top is FBSD. For some reason, the community doesn't want to be on top.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

SirDice said:


> Wrong place.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


If you truly think that my argument is "FBSD isn't like Linux", then you are delusional. The point is that FBSD is supposed to be orders of magnitude BETTER than Linux. And in the past, it WAS. However, most of you are fighting progress -and have been doing so for decades.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> the FBSD community is running off such people, instead of recruiting & welcoming them.


Do you seriously believe that big funders and power users of FreeBSD read these forums, before deciding whether to invest $50M into FreeBSD or into Linux?

No. They have their technical experts evaluate the system, they talk to the likes of Kirk and Debbie Goodkin. They don't look at your or my opinion on a chat group.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> You seem to think that FreeBSD is failing. I very much disagree. I think it is succeeding spectacularly. It creates a reliable, well-built, easy-to-use OS, with some of the best file system technology (UFS and ZFS) out there. The system is stable from release to release, has good support for common hardware (x86 in 32- and 64-bit mode and common interfaces), and is super easy to maintain and upgrade. It makes for an excellent server.
> 
> Clearly, hardware support for display hardware is not something the volunteers are terribly interested in. And GUI/DE stuff gets minimal effort, fundamentally just lightweight porting of things that are developed on and for Linux. If that bothers you, then stop using it for GUI/DE purposes. Or volunteer to fix it: Quit your day job, and start working fulltime on it.


FBSD is now in the position of having to get ZFS updates from OpenZFS, which is actually a Linux-based ZFS tree. FBSD had the lead in ZFS. How did Linux usurp FBSD with the source code of a file system that it can't even keep in it's own kernel tree? How do we keep losing, & why are you so comfortable with it?


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

AlexanderProphet said:


> I often wonder what people who are furious about the market share of operating systems would be like if they had something real to be angry about. It’s a scary thought.


No one is actually furious. You're adding to the topic elements that aren't actually there. Just because a person participates in a conversation doesn't mean that they're furious. To even suggest it is being intellectually dishonest.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> Do you seriously believe that big funders and power users of FreeBSD read these forums, before deciding whether to invest $50M into FreeBSD or into Linux?
> 
> No. They have their technical experts evaluate the system, they talk to the likes of Kirk and Debbie Goodkin. They don't look at your or my opinion on a chat group.


I never claimed that they did. Why would they have to? I'm sure that their technical experts are fully capable of seeing the same things. Considering the fact that they're mostly putting the money into Linux now, it's reasonable to assume that they're seeing FBSD as not being competitive against Linux these days. And that sucks, because FBSD used to be so far ahead of Linux.


----------



## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

OK, so FreeBSD is switching from its own ZFS source tree (which is all forked eventually from the core ZFS one) to a new one that is shared with Linux. I don't see that as a problem, I see that as progress.

And I don't care about someone having the lead. The developers know where to get the best quality and best efficiency source code for ZFS for, and I let them make that decision. This is not a race, and sharing source code with Linux is not necessarily a bad thing. 

You seem to think that the import thing is "losing" or "not losing". Why do you care whether we los? I care that FreeBSD is a good OS for the purpose I use it for, and it is EXCELLENT. I don't hate Linux ... matter-of-fact, I use tens of thousands of Linux machines every day as part of my job, and I have a handful of them at home too. Linux is also an excellent solution, but for a different set of tasks than FreeBSD. And this is not a "we" thing: I am not a part of the FreeBSD tribe, and I don't see other tribes as the enemy. I am a happy user of FreeBSD (and a happy user of MacOS, and of Linux, and of Windows, and the other OSes have taken a back seat), and I try to help FreeBSD a little bit here and there.


----------



## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> ...sport sailing (small sailboats): Not a practical means of transportation, but a great way to...(go) really fast in circles on the weekend, while getting soaking wet and bitterly cold.


I see you've sailed in the Bay Area.


ralphbsz said:


> Nearly everyone uses a computer as an appliance: You buy it at a store, it has a working OS on it, it gets upgraded (today that's nearly completely automatic), and there is no need to make decisions. And they work exceedingly well, with very little effort.


I wish that were still true. Macs used to be my go-to for a laptop that Just Worked(tm), but they've become increasingly unreliable with every new Macos release. I used to skip every other release because they alternated primarily bugfix releases with new-feature releases in the Jobs era.

Alas, that is no longer the case. Every new release is chock-full of new "features" I don't want (a "news" app I can't uninstall? WTF?), and breaks basic backwards compatibility.

It's become clear to me that Mac is a legacy product for Apple. They're a phone company now, and they're trying to unify all their products around the same hardware and software platform. I give it 5 years before a Macbook is just an iPad with a keyboard.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> Yes, we've heard that. I went drinking beer with Linus a few times in the mid- and late 90s (before he moved to the US, before he had kids, matter-of-fact before he even had a steady girlfriend). Just like many others, Linus had hardware that was capable of running a real operating system (a 386), and couldn't find a good free operating system. I was in the same situation in the early 90s; I tried buying BSDi (386BSD was not ready to be installed yet), but there was a series of problems that prevented me getting BSD (biggest one: incompatibility with hardware, both networking and display). So I installed Linux on my server at home around 93 or so.
> 
> But you seem to think that the current decision of what direction Linux proceeds in is made by Linus. Nothing could be further from the truth. Linus himself is a minor contributor to the source code. There is 1 Linus Torvalds, and there are thousands of Linux developers who work for Intel or IBM.


I never made the claim that Linux controls the direction of Linux today. I was strictly speaking about that one particular topic -why Linux came into existence.


ralphbsz said:


> Sorry, that's bullshit. You seem to think that the direction of Linux is set by individual users. That's utter nonsense. Users use the system, they don't develop it. Some users like it so much, they graduate to be developers and contributors. But those are not really relevant. What really matters is something like the CEO of IBM deciding that Linux is a strategic asset, and investing a few hundred people (a hundred developers and the various support roles) into making Linux more usable for IBM (feel free to substitute Intel or Oracle or ... for IBM in this example). Or a company like RedHat or Suse deciding to take a few dozen M$ of venture capital investment and making a go of being a Linux contributor and distributor. And you can be sure that the CEO of IBM (or Intel or a VC ...) will not be swayed by a more comfortable installer. They have staff, they look at numbers, they look at strategy and market.


Actually, it's not bullshit, because I was speaking towards the reaction of the community from the mere mention of making changes.


ralphbsz said:


> Installer and the "stench of the lawsuit" (which BSD won overwhelmingly) have nothing to do with it. Your mistake is that you think that your personal experience (as an individual amateur desktop user) is relevant to the big picture. It is not. 99% of all computers in the world that run Linux do not have a desktop (they are servers!), and the vast majority of Linux desktops are being used in a corporate setting.


Actually, BSD didn't WIN anything. The lawsuit was settled. And yet, the lawsuit absolutely DID have a lot to do with it, because by the time it was all settled, the rest of the industry had moved on to other OSes. Clearly, you know nothing of the big picture. You can't even seem to comprehend how much of an important role that chronology played in the matter. Additionally, screenshot where I mentioned the what most of the Linux machines were using. The entire time, I've been talking about desktop systems, with the exception of the few moments that I mentioned HPC system. At this point, it's obvious that you can't even keep up with the conversation. That's senility kicking in. Go take a nap.


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## SirDice (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> If you truly think that my argument is "FBSD isn't like Linux", then you are delusional.


Did you read any further than the first line?


DutchDaemon said:


> Note that this is a general user and administrator forum, where the community aims to assist those who want to install, run, or upgrade _*FreeBSD as-is*_. Discussions about what FreeBSD _needs to be_, or _needs to add_, or _needs to lose_, are pointless on the forums. We do not maintain the operating system here.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> OK, so FreeBSD is switching from its own ZFS source tree (which is all forked eventually from the core ZFS one) to a new one that is shared with Linux. I don't see that as a problem, I see that as progress.
> 
> And I don't care about someone having the lead. The developers know where to get the best quality and best efficiency source code for ZFS for, and I let them make that decision. This is not a race, and sharing source code with Linux is not necessarily a bad thing.
> 
> You seem to think that the import thing is "losing" or "not losing". Why do you care whether we los? I care that FreeBSD is a good OS for the purpose I use it for, and it is EXCELLENT. I don't hate Linux ... matter-of-fact, I use tens of thousands of Linux machines every day as part of my job, and I have a handful of them at home too. Linux is also an excellent solution, but for a different set of tasks than FreeBSD. And this is not a "we" thing: I am not a part of the FreeBSD tribe, and I don't see other tribes as the enemy. I am a happy user of FreeBSD (and a happy user of MacOS, and of Linux, and of Windows, and the other OSes have taken a back seat), and I try to help FreeBSD a little bit here and there.


That's a sentiment that people who're comfortable with losing often have. I've used OSes that lost before. It sucks having to go to a new platform.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

SirDice said:


> Did you read any further than the first line?


I was responding to YOU, not to blurb that you posted. It's wholly irrelevant whether or not the OS is maintained here. The point of a forum is discussion -that's why forums exist.


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## wolffnx (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> It seems to be the FBSD community's position that rejecting the average user is a successful approach. This is a failed strategy that continues to fail each decade.


Not even close,

"average user"=I want everything easy to use without use my brain and want stars and light over my desktop

"normal user"=not a Nasa astronaut or super genius,
simple install the packages and follows a few steps

if FreeBSD dont want "average" users the comunity not even 
mantain the ports for build a desktop(xorg,etc) 
and the pakages numbers are very strong and complete


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

wolffnx said:


> Not even close,
> 
> "average user"=I want everything easy to use without use my brain and want stars and light over my desktop
> 
> ...


That's not even remotely what an average user is, nor is that what a normal user is. People are simply asking to make the system easier to install & easier to setup without being a damned system admin. That's it. That's all. But the moment anyone asks for that, the community tries to crap all over them. It's not as if they're asking for the world. They're not even asking for anything new to be developed -these things ALREADY EXIST.


----------



## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Even simple things, such as improve their installer. They did nothing to make their system welcoming to new users. As a result, new users went to Linux -which actively recruited users.


I actually installed Freebsd, Slackware, and Redhat in the mid 90s, and I found Freebsd's installer at the time to be the best. Slackware, which was the first distro to gain traction, had no installer at all.


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> There's nothing bastardized about android.


Android has removed all the standard Unix IPC mechanisms and replaced them with their own systems.

In any case, you're yelling at the wrong people. This forum is mainly for users of Freebsd. We have no influence over the development or direction of the project. Your should take your beef to the Foundation, and maybe to the development mailing lists.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> People are simply asking to make the system easier to install & easier to setup without being a damned system admin.



FreeBSD Handbook + Patience = A working desktop.

Let's not feed this troll any longer folks.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> I actually installed Freebsd, Slackware, and Redhat in the mid 90s, and I found Freebsd's installer at the time to be the best. Slackware, which was the first distro to gain traction, had no installer at all.


Linux was still a baby in the 90s. We're a few decades beyond that now. At this point, we actually have one of the worst installers now.


Jose said:


> Android has removed all the standard Unix IPC mechanisms and replaced them with their own systems.


All of those things were far too heavy & weren't performant enough for a phone.


Jose said:


> In any case, you're yelling at the wrong people. This forum is mainly for users of Freebsd. We have no influence over the development or direction of the project. Your should take your beef to the Foundation, and maybe to the development mailing lists.


No, I'm actually yelling at the right people. Why? Because it's the people in this forum that were shooting down the guy who asked about a better installer. In fact, it's ALWAYS the people in forums who jump down the throats of other users who simply start conversations about how things could be better. So, yes, it's the users in this forum who should be yelled at for constantly trying to stifle the voices of others who's only sin were to bring up new topics. My problems aren't with the actual developers. I merely used the developers actions as evidence to prove specific points. This was NEVER about the developers.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> I never claimed that they did. Why would they have to? I'm sure that their technical experts are fully capable of seeing the same things.


And they did, and they made decisions. For example, I happen to know the CTO of NetApp (now retired), and a few decades ago, he made the decision to use an early FreeBSD version as the embedded OS inside the NetApp servers, and still today, NetApp appliances are built around FreeBSD. Similarly, a few decades ago, when Apple needed to refresh MacOS, they made the decision to use the FreeBSD userland as a starting point (with the Mach kernel); a friend of mine (was a graduate student on a project I worked on) was one of the BSD evangelists at Apple.

On the other hand, companies like Intel, Oracle and IBM decided to throw in their lot with Linux. For good and sensible reasons.



> Considering the fact that they're mostly putting the money into Linux now, it's reasonable to assume that they're seeing FBSD as not being competitive against Linux these days.


For the problems they are trying to solve (millions of servers, tens of thousands of desktops), Linux is the better solution. I don't see this is a problem, but as something good. For example, I go to my little shop in the basement, and hanging on the walls are hammers, screwdrivers, and saws. Sitting on the ground are routers, tablesaws, and drill presses. I would not use a hammer to cut a piece of wood in half, nor a drill press to make a long straight cut. If I want a good integrated desktop, I'll use Windows or MacOS. If I want a server OS to install on a million machines, I'll pick a (highly tuned) version of Linux. If I need a small server OS with highly reliable storage stack, I'll use FreeBSD. If I want to monitor a few pump motors and water pressures on a Raspberry Pi, I install Raspbian. This is not about competition. The world is not a race.



> And that sucks, because FBSD used to be so far ahead of Linux.


The last time that BSD was ahead of Linux in terms of installed base must have been around 92 or 93. And that was before FreeBSD even existed, when instead the various forks were called either BSD (if you got it from Berkeley), BSDi or 386BSD.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> FreeBSD Handbook + Patience = A working desktop.
> 
> Let's not feed this troll any longer folks.


Absolutely nothing that I've said was trolling the fact of the matter is that NONE of that has to be done in order to get a working desktop for GhostBSD. It didn't have to be done for PC-BSD, either. So, your classic fallback line of "RTFM" amounts to bullshit in a post-2000 world. No one is going for that anymore, just to get a desktop. At this point, FBSD is nothing more than an ingredient.


----------



## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Linux was still a baby in the 90s. We're a few decades beyond that now. At this point, we actually have one of the worst installers now.


Why didn't Freebsd "win" in the 90s if it had the best installer?


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> All of those things were far too heavy & weren't performant enough for a phone.


Right, so they bastardized the Linux kernel, just like Kpedersen said.


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> This was NEVER about the developers.


Steve Ballmer disagrees with you.




_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMldOiiG1Ko_


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Jan 14, 2021)

Well, all this is personal opinion and wants and desires of A. D. Sharpe Sr. of what FreeBSD should be doing. The personal opinions of everyone else is elsewhere. You may disagree with this and that's fine but FreeBSD is doing what it can and what it wants to do and you can be happy with that or not.


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> And they did, and they made decisions. For example, I happen to know the CTO of NetApp (now retired), and a few decades ago, he made the decision to use an early FreeBSD version as the embedded OS inside the NetApp servers, and still today, NetApp appliances are built around FreeBSD. Similarly, a few decades ago, when Apple needed to refresh MacOS, they made the decision to use the FreeBSD userland as a starting point (with the Mach kernel); a friend of mine (was a graduate student on a project I worked on) was one of the BSD evangelists at Apple.
> 
> On the other hand, companies like Intel, Oracle and IBM decided to throw in their lot with Linux. For good and sensible reasons.


Ok, but if you've got to go to a retired CTO or reference an OS that was created about 2 decades ago, then you've pretty much proved my point. Who's choosing FBSD today? Really, MOST businesses should be. The problem isn't that businesses aren't. The problem is that no one is bothering to find out why businesses aren't, & then correcting the problems.


ralphbsz said:


> For the problems they are trying to solve (millions of servers, tens of thousands of desktops), Linux is the better solution. I don't see this is a problem, but as something good. For example, I go to my little shop in the basement, and hanging on the walls are hammers, screwdrivers, and saws. Sitting on the ground are routers, tablesaws, and drill presses. I would not use a hammer to cut a piece of wood in half, nor a drill press to make a long straight cut. If I want a good integrated desktop, I'll use Windows or MacOS. If I want a server OS to install on a million machines, I'll pick a (highly tuned) version of Linux. If I need a small server OS with highly reliable storage stack, I'll use FreeBSD. If I want to monitor a few pump motors and water pressures on a Raspberry Pi, I install Raspbian. This is not about competition. The world is not a race.


Linux didn't actually become a better solution until recently (past decade or so). Before that, it was merely a matter of Linux hype & bandwagoning.


ralphbsz said:


> The last time that BSD was ahead of Linux in terms of installed base must have been around 92 or 93. And that was before FreeBSD even existed, when instead the various forks were called either BSD (if you got it from Berkeley), BSDi or 386BSD.


That's not really true. The BSDs were ahead before the distribution model exploded & the number of distributions skyrocketed. Let's not forget that BSDs were being used in commercial products for a very long time, even after Linux started building up steam.


----------



## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Absolutely nothing that I've said was trolling the fact of the matter is that NONE of that has to be done in order to get a working desktop for GhostBSD. It didn't have to be done for PC-BSD, either. So, your classic fallback line of "RTFM" amounts to bullshit in a post-2000 world. No one is going for that anymore, just to get a desktop. At this point, FBSD is nothing more than an ingredient.


*translation*

"I'm too lazy to actually read because Big Redmond and Fruit Co. have held my hands since I first touched a computer."

FreeBSD has lived through the demise of many companies. You can make better use of the energy you're putting out here.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Linux didn't actually become a better solution until recently (past decade or so). Before that, it was merely a matter of Linux hype & bandwagoning.


So what Freebsd needs is hype and bandwagoning? Where do the installers and GUIs you've been ranting about fit in?


----------



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> Why didn't Freebsd "win" in the 90s if it had the best installer?


The installer wasn't great back then, it was just better. But we already talked about why BSD didn't win in the 90s -you're simply not paying attention.


Jose said:


> Right, so they bastardized the Linux kernel, just like Kpedersen said.


That's not bastardizing the kernel, it's upgrading & improving subsystems. Try again.


Jose said:


> Steve Ballmer disagrees with you.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Disagreeing with me doesn't make a person right, any more than agreeing with me would. This is a forum. Topics are supposed to be discussed. If everyone agreed, then there wouldn't be anything to discuss.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> *translation*
> 
> "I'm too lazy to actually read because Big Redmond and Fruit Co. have held my hands since I first touched a computer."
> 
> FreeBSD has lived through the demise of many companies. You can make better use of the energy you're putting out here.


Actually, I haven't been a windows user in decades. If you're not capable of having an actual discussion & are only capable of just talking shit, then just say that.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The installer wasn't great back then, it was just better. But we already talked about why BSD didn't win in the 90s -you're simply not paying attention.


Hype and bandwagoning? But that was later, I thought.


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> That's not bastardizing the kernel, it's upgrading & improving subsystems. Try again.


Since these are "improvements" they've been accepted by the upstream Linux kernel, right?


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Disagreeing with me doesn't make a person right, any more than agreeing with me would. This is a forum. Topics are supposed to be discussed. If everyone agreed, then there wouldn't be anything to discuss.


I don't see a lot of discussion here. I see you shouting angrily at people who disagree with you. I'm not sure what's making you so angry. If Linux has "won" with installers or GUIs or hype or whatever, just go use Linux. Why are you here shouting at us?


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> So what Freebsd needs is hype and bandwagoning? Where do the installers and GUIs you've been ranting about fit in?


I never said that FBSD needed hype nor bandwagoning. You're intentionally missing the point. Users have simply been asking for better installers & for the installer to install a system that boots into a desktop. That's what they've been asking for. None of you have been able to give a real reason for why those things shouldn't be provided. Instead, you keep bringing up bullshit that have absolutely nothing to do with what those users have been asking for.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> I never said that FBSD needed hype nor bandwagoning. You're intentionally missing the point. Users have simply been asking for better installers & for the installer to install a system that boots into a desktop. That's what they've been asking for. None of you have been able to give a real reason for why those things shouldn't be provided. Instead, you keep bringing up bullshit that have absolutely nothing to do with what those users have been asking for.


We've established that a superior installer is not how Linux "won". According to you, it "won" because of hype and bandwagoning. By your own logic, the users who are asking for a better installer and a default desktop are wrong.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> Hype and bandwagoning? But that was later, I thought.


You are now making up arguments.


Jose said:


> Since these are "improvements" they've been accepted by the upstream Linux kernel, right?


Lots of improvements never make it to upstream. This isn't a solid argument.


Jose said:


> I don't see a lot of discussion here. I see you shouting angrily at people who disagree with you. I'm not sure what's making you so angry. If Linux has "won" with installers or GUIs or hype or whatever, just go use Linux. Why are you here shouting at us?


I haven't yelled at anyone. At no point did I type an all caps sentence, nor did I start piling on exclamation marks. Try again. Additionally, if your argument is "go use something else", then that's also a trash argument. The fact of the matter is that you aren't capable of presenting a technical reason why what people have been asking for is a bad thing. You simply want me to stop talking about it, so that I don't continue to expose the fact that you don't have a valid reason for trying to stifle other users.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> We've established that a superior installer is not how Linux "won". According to you, it "won" because of hype and bandwagoning. By your own logic, the users who are asking for a better installer and a default desktop are wrong.


Actually, in terms of the desktop, those thing are why Linux is "winning". Saying that they've "won" means that the fight is over. The point is that things can always be improved. Your argument amounts to little more than "we don't want things to improve for other users, because it's just fine for us right now". That's a bullshit argument. Telling people to go use something else is crap.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Users have simply been asking for better installers & for the installer to install a system that boots into a desktop.



Again, if you understood the implications of doing such a thing; you'd understand why this doesn't exist yet. The FreeBSD Handbook acts as an appropriate mediation between use case scenarios. Let me know when you need a shovel to get your head out.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> Again, if you understood the implications of doing such a thing; you'd understand why this doesn't exist yet. The FreeBSD Handbook acts as an appropriate mediation between use case scenarios. Let me know when you need a shovel to get your head out.


Actually, it DOES exist. It's existed for quite some time with various BSD groups. The only issue was that FBSD isn't providing it. Thankfully, other groups exist & have patched up this deficiency. GBSD exists now. More users are starting to see FBSD for what it's become -merely an ingredient.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> You are now making up arguments.


Nope, I was quoting you. Directly.


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Lots of improvements never make it to upstream. This isn't a solid argument.


For example?


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Your argument amounts to little more than "we don't want things to improve for other users, because it's just fine for us right now". That's a bullshit argument. Telling people to go use something else is crap.


I haven't made an argument at all. Please tone down your language. Invective does not lead to productive discussion. That is why you're here, right?


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## Argentum (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> I never said that FBSD needed hype nor bandwagoning. You're intentionally missing the point. Users have simply been asking for better installers & for the installer to install a system that boots into a desktop. That's what they've been asking for. None of you have been able to give a real reason for why those things shouldn't be provided. Instead, you keep bringing up bullshit that have absolutely nothing to do with what those users have been asking for.


Do not agree. Installer seems to be the smallest problem here. Many people just install once and use a long time after that. Text based installer has it's strengths. For example installing on a virtual machine through terminal.


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## Emrion (Jan 14, 2021)

This thread became annoying. Is someone remembering the initial subject?
Time to close it, I think.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The only issue was that FBSD isn't providing it.



Exactly. That's my point.

u can haz shovel?


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## kpedersen (Jan 14, 2021)

I will have to go slower for you then. Lets simply tackle your first point.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Not really. FreeBSD is an entire OS. Linux is only a kernel. Also, PS4 isn't used everywhere. But more importantly, I never made reference to ANYTHING being used everywhere -those were YOUR words. You're attempting to make an argument against something that I've never said. That's intellectually dishonest.



Firstly, can you explain how you think being just a kernel that is relevant to the conversation? Are you trying to suggest that a benefit of Linux is that it is an incomplete OS? I would disagree.

Secondly, you brought up Android being used by mentioning "Ever heard of Android?", implying it is popular (which it is). So I brought up the PS4, also demonstrating its popularity (which it also is).

So can you explain how Android is a good demonstration of Linux's perceived success but PS4 isn't an equally good demonstration for FreeBSD? Linux being a kernel isn't substantial enough of an argument. FreeBSD also has a kernel that can obviously be separated with minimal work.

Android and the PS4 are pretty much used everywhere. Many people have them. They are a consumer commodity like food processors and TVs. Disputing that is just wasting both our times. If I say Windows is everywhere, this is also fairly true. Sure, might not be in *my* house, but it is still largely everywhere. Yes they are my words, thanks for pointing that out. Can you progress onto you actual points now rather than trying to fiddle about with words like a law student?


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> Nope, I was quoting you. Directly.


Actually, you weren't directly quoting me.


Jose said:


> For example?


There've been scheduling improvements that never made it to the Linux kernel. There've been input subsystem improvements that never made it into the Linux kernel. There've been framebuffer improvements that never made it into the Linux kernel. None of this is new information.


Jose said:


> I haven't made an argument at all. Please tone down your language. Invective does not lead to productive discussion. That is why you're here, right?


If you have a problem with the way your argument was described, then come with a better argument. Its funny how you never said a single word when another user used the term "bullshit", so don't try to get righteous with me.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Argentum said:


> Do not agree. Installer seems to be the smallest problem here. Many people just install once and use a long time after that. Text based installer has it's strengths. For example installing on a virtual machine through terminal.


Regardless of whether or not an installer is a small problem, doesn't give anyone justification for trying to stifle the voices of other users. If users are asking for something, then that's what their asking for.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Actually, you weren't directly quoting me.


Really? You consider this "discussion"?


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> There've been scheduling improvements that never made it to the Linux kernel. There've been input subsystem improvements that never made it into the Linux kernel. There've been framebuffer improvements that never made it into the Linux kernel. None of this is new information.


Links please.


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> If you have a problem with the way your argument was described, then come with a better argument. Its funny how you never said a single word when another user used the term "bullshit", so don't try to get righteous with me.


I was not addressed by anyone who used that term. You were directly addressing me when you used it. Call it righteousness if you like, I'm just trying to keep the discussion civil and productive.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> Exactly. That's my point.
> 
> u can haz shovel?


Considering that people are asking for it, your point is irrelevant. You're simply trying to stifle them -which is the bigger problem.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> Really? You consider this "discussion".


Are you not here conversing?


Jose said:


> Links please.


I'm not about to dig up old links to codebases that aren't around anymore. I'll give you 1 example that you can look up yourself -the KGI project.


Jose said:


> I was not addressed by anyone who used that term. You were directly addressing me when you used it. Call it righteousness if you like, I'm just trying to keep the discussion civil and productive.


It's currently as civil as it's going to get.


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## Phishfry (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> Fighting for the desktop in 2021 is a fool's errand. The desktop is disappearing.


I think the Corona virus shows how much a desktop is really needed.
Every child in my area has a laptop that they need to do their classwork.
So maybe Covid-19 will stem the tide. Phone is limited but convenient.
I do see alot of chromebooks in the edu space. Google adding to its catalog.

I think many people do mobile but they still have a computer at home for real work.


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## shkhln (Jan 14, 2021)

Are we done with fighting the evil FreeBSD community yet?


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> I will have to go slower for you then. Lets simply tackle your first point.


Maybe you should go back & reread the thread slower -you've clearly missed a few things.


kpedersen said:


> Firstly, can you explain how you think being just a kernel that is relevant to the conversation? Are you trying to suggest that a benefit of Linux is that it is an incomplete OS?


You're taking 2 different things out of context & trying to put them together. I suggest that you go back & reread what I was saying about Linux being a kernel.


kpedersen said:


> Secondly, you brought up Android being used by mentioning "Ever heard of Android?", implying it is popular (which it is). So I brought up the PS4, also demonstrating its popularity (which it also is).


I brought up Android in response to the argument about the iPhone. It wasn't about popularity, it was about competition in the mobile phone space. Additionally, more people have mobile phones than game consoles. So, bringing up the PS4 as some form of reference for the conversation doesn't actually work.


kpedersen said:


> So can you explain how Android is a good demonstration of Linux's perceived success but PS4 isn't an equally good demonstrations for FreeBSD?


Because the Android ecosystem is an extension of the Linux ecosystem. The PS4's OS isn't an extension of the FreeBSD ecosystem.


kpedersen said:


> Android and the PS4 are pretty much used everywhere. Many people have them. They are a consumer commodity like food processors. Disputing that is just wasting both our times. If I say Windows is everywhere, this is also fairly true. Sure, might not be in *my* house, but it is still largely everywhere. Yes they are my words, thanks for pointing that out. Can you progress onto you actual points now?


Actually, the PS4 isn't pretty much used everywhere. Many people have them, but MOST people don't have them.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Are you not here conversing?


I'm not engaging in a childish game of "no you didn't - yes you did!".


A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> I'm not about to dig up old links to codebases that aren't around anymore. I'll give you 1 example that you can look up yourself -the KGI project.


That didn't take long


> But the KGI developers never tried to engage with the Linux graphics developers years ago when there was potential for collaboration. With the complexity of modern GPUs, it doesn't make too much sense to now design their own frry wellamework and then write their own drivers too, when they could support the necessary Linux components and then port those more feature-rich drivers.








						The Kernel Graphics Interface (KGI) Is Effectively Dead - Phoronix
					






					www.phoronix.com
				





A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> It's currently as civil as it's going to get.


Very well. You can have that last word you crave so much.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Phishfry said:


> I think the Corona virus shows how much a desktop is really needed.
> Every child in my area has a laptop that they need to do their classwork.
> So maybe Covid-19 will stem the tide. Phone is limited but convenient.
> I do see alot of chromebooks in the edu space. Google adding to its catalog.
> ...


Precisely.


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## Jose (Jan 14, 2021)

Phishfry said:


> I think the Corona virus shows how much a desktop is really needed.
> Every child in my area has a laptop that they need to do their classwork.
> So maybe Covid-19 will stem the tide. Phone is limited but convenient.
> I do see alot of chromebooks in the edu space. Google adding to its catalog.


This will make it worse. They'll associate laptops with the boring schoolwork and endless Zoom classroom sessions with some old teacher droning on about things they don't care about.

At the same time they'll be on their phones under the desk, chatting with their friends on Discord, watching the latest funny Tiktok video, and checking out the Snapchat story their friend just linked.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> I'm not engaging in a childish game of "no you didn't - yes you did!".
> 
> That didn't take long
> 
> ...


Actually, they DID try to engage with the kernel developers before their project died. In fact, here's an email about it from the linux kernel mailing list. Maybe you & phoronix should get your facts straight...



			Linux-kernel mailing list archive 2003-06,: Re: support for dual independent keyboards in devel kernel?


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Actually, they DID try to engage with the kernel developers before their project died. In fact, here's an email about it from the linux kernel mailing list. Maybe you & phoronix should get your facts straight...
> 
> 
> 
> Linux-kernel mailing list archive 2003-06,: Re: support for dual independent keyboards in devel kernel?


Here's another one from the Linux kernel mailing list archive...


			Linux-Kernel Archive: Re: fbdev & KGI.


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## kpedersen (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Because the Android ecosystem is an extension of the Linux ecosystem. The PS4's OS isn't an extension of the FreeBSD ecosystem.


Oh really? How so? Is that just your opinion?

Last time I checked, Dalvik, SurfaceFlinger and other Android things are a very different userland. Yes, some things are shared but very minimal. I think the work Microsoft has done with WSL has actually contributed more.

Sony contributed to the FreeBSD codebase and LLVM compiler. So is also benefiting it.

Can you clearly state which part of the Android ecosystem you are referring to is benefiting Linux? Last time I checked, the Android NDK also moved away from GCC and to LLVM clang. Any improvements here to compiler technology actually benefit BSD more.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Actually, the PS4 isn't pretty much used everywhere. Many people have them, but MOST people don't have them.


More people have PS4s than people who have Linux workstations I guess is the jist I am happy with you to take away from this. That is what is meant by everywhere. Another example is COVID is everywhere but not *everyone* has it if you are being pedantic.



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> You're taking 2 different things out of context & trying to put them together.


No I'm not. Can you answer the question please? The following:

Why is your response of "Not really. FreeBSD is an entire OS. Linux is only a kernel" a valid argument to my comparison Android being related to Linux in a similar way that PS4 is relating to FreeBSD.


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## shkhln (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> you & phoronix


Please, don't insult people by comparing them to Michael Larabel.


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## Phishfry (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Users have simply been asking for better installers & for the installer to install a system that boots into a desktop


I reject this.
Debian and Devuan use almost exactly the same ncurses that FreeBSD uses for setup.
If you start the installer in Graphical Mode it does look better.
But who cares how an installer looks.
Its main function is to setup locale and timezones along with hostname. I see little variations among installers.
Even between sysinstall and bsdinstall there was no major operational changes.

Basic setup is the same with most OS. Maybe you think FreeBSD needs `tasksel`? Is that what you desire?
FreeBSD does seem to be missing that.
I like the FreeBSD installer and think it works fine. Using `bsdinstall` for creating jails is Delightful.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> Linux didn't actually become a better solution until recently (past decade or so). Before that, it was merely a matter of Linux hype & bandwagoning.


Nonsense.

I had a 386 in about 93 or so, when they became affordable to a young researcher. At that point, I had a few choices of installing software: SysV (several thousand $), BSDi (about $1000), or Linux (free). 386BSD was not functional at that time ... it was an experimental system. And getting a distribution from Berkeley's CSRG was impossible for an individual. By the way, please don't think that my criticism of 386BSD is to be taken as a personal dig against Lynn and Bill (whom I know personally, they live close to me, and like have been involved in school volunteering and politics), but as a statement of fact.

Yes, the installer was awful. I started with the SLS distribution (34 floppy disks!), then switched to Yggdrasil, and Slackware. But it worked! And it had Xwindows support (which I needed, I was doing numerical analysis and graphing); on BSD, you needed to have an exact model video card (the Tseng ET4000), since no other cards were supported, and that card was de-facto impossible to buy for individuals, since Tseng had no distribution network.

Here is the real reason Linux became a success: By 94, there was lots of software available for it. For example, I needed a certain data analysis toolkit (CERN's hbook/hplot/PAW), and because Linux was an immediate hit with the CERN and physics folks, it got compiled for Linux within days. I needed a good Fortran compiler, and I ended up making my own contributions to f2c to get it compatible on Linux; at the time, BSD had no Fortran compiler at all (which it didn't need, since the system was intended to be a CS research tool, and computer scientists don't program in Fortran). Also in 94, the first C++ compilers started working reliably, and a commercial GUI builder for Linux came out with a C++ backend. BSD was a niche solution for computer scientists and a few hobbyists, whereas Linux was used in production by then.

By the late 90s, the success of Linux had become inevitable. I remember sitting in the lobby of HP Labs in 99, and Linus was ushered in, he was the guest of honor at a research conference. While a few people in the audience would have recognized Kirk, Eric or Sam, Linus was already a rock star. From a research viewpoint, BSD was ahead (Linux internals were a mess), but Linux already had a giant market share, and more importantly mind share. Just as an example: When the first Itanium chips came out (in about 99, that's when secret prototype chips and boards became available internally at Intel and HP), the first OSes ported to it were ... HP-UX and VMS. Obviously, since those were needed to run on it. At the same time, a very small group (fundamentally one guy) ported Linux to it. While the lab where that port was done was a a heavy BSD user, nobody even considered putting BSD on the chip. What would be the point? At that time, Linux was already used by a massive number of machines, while BSD was a niche product, used for research and embedded products.

That's not "hype and bandwagoneering". The reality is that Linux filled a giant hole in the market, and succeeded spectacularly at it.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Jose said:


> This will make it worse. They'll associate laptops with the boring schoolwork and endless Zoom classroom sessions with some old teacher droning on about things they don't care about.
> 
> At the same time they'll be on their phones under the desk, chatting with their friends on Discord, watching the latest funny Tiktok video, and checking out the Snapchat story their friend just linked.


You've definitely got a point, there...


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Phishfry said:


> I reject this.
> Debian and Devuan use almost exactly the same ncurses that FreeBSD uses for setup.
> If you start the installer in Graphical Mode it does look better.
> But who cares how an installer looks.
> ...


It doesn't matter how much you reject it, people have been asking for it for years. In fact, so many people have been asking for it that there're been multiple groups splitting off & providing it.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> Nonsense.
> 
> I had a 386 in about 93 or so, when they became affordable to a young researcher. At that point, I had a few choices of installing software: SysV (several thousand $), BSDi (about $1000), or Linux (free). 386BSD was not functional at that time ... it was an experimental system. And getting a distribution from Berkeley's CSRG was impossible for an individual. By the way, please don't think that my criticism of 386BSD is to be taken as a personal dig against Lynn and Bill (whom I know personally, they live close to me, and like have been involved in school volunteering and politics), but as a statement of fact.
> 
> ...


All of that was great to read. I love reading about that period of time, because we can never go back & relive them. However, what you've done is simply illustrated instances of bandwagoning. You've shown us bandwagoneering in the early 90s that lead to Linux's success post-90s. You mentioned Linus being a rockstar. You've even mentioned how Linux internals were a mess. But hey, you've also mentioned a few big companies that jumped on that bandwagon. So, I'll concede on the fact that Linux did get mindshare & marketshare quickly. However, here's my question to you:

In your opinion, what would FBSD (or any BSD for that matter) have to do to pull ahead of Linux?


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## kpedersen (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> there're been multiple groups splitting off & providing it.


And failing. This is the key part.

As @ralphbz mentioned, BSD was relegated to more niche research positions. But that *is* its position. It will not weaken on that because otherwise you could just use Linux. It doesn't make sense to try to make a worse Linux than Linux. The Linux communities just need to clean up their own project.



ralphbsz said:


> BSD had no Fortran compiler at all (which it didn't need, since the system was intended to be a CS research tool, and computer scientists don't program in Fortran). Also in 94, the first C++ compilers started working reliably, and a commercial GUI builder for Linux came out with a C++ backend. BSD was a niche solution for computer scientists and a few hobbyists, whereas Linux was used in production by then.


This was interesting. Did BSD not get a C++ compiler until quite late? I assumed cfront was going to be on BSD before most other platforms.

It is always amazing how little idealizm there was back then, people would just use / prefer any crap if it had a newer feature they needed. I always saw that, even with MS-DOS people would give up a fairly interesting UNIX workstation just to access some ratty publishing software compatible with DOS XD


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

So, this persons entire argument is based on the premise that there is a demand for an OOTB experience (which we all already agreed upon), and that developers are oblivious and/or ignorant of this demand. The committers have been discussing this demand for years, and they've consistently (at various Conferences) explained why this endeavor is a hard task to execute. This person also fails to acknowledge that all required desktop infrastrucutre (DRM, Mesa3d, libinput, WINE, X11/Wayland, etc) are upstream Linux, and that simply chasing upstream is a zero sum game; yet the developers have made strides to provide said libraries for FreeBSD. It's also worth noting that ABI/API stability is a MUST with regards to shipping libraries in base.

At this point, replying to this person is akin to talking to a brick wall. They simply don't get it, or they're willfully naive and/or ignorant of the entire predicament.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> In your opinion, what would FBSD (or any BSD for that matter) have to do to pull ahead of Linux?


What do you mean by "pull ahead"? Achieve higher market share? That's flat out impossible. Look, the market share of Linux is 100% among supercomputers, 99% on non-windows servers. That ship has sailed decades ago, the decision was made when nearly everyone embraced Linux in the mid 90s. Among desktops, the market share of Linux is tiny (about 2%, give or take 1%), and the market share of FreeBSD is one or two orders of magnitude lower. Again, catching up with Linux is not possible.

Nor is it desirable. The world is not about being a race. Winning doesn't mean being the richest person or fastest runner. It means being good at what you do. FreeBSD is good at being a tight, well-engineered niche operating system. Leaving that niche would destroy it. If you really want to see FreeBSD deployed on lots of desktops, who is going to be doing the support? Where do you find companies like RedHat and Suse that offer paid support to millions of users? In the desktop market, FreeBSD has no advantages, many disadvantages, and a gigantic (unsurmountable) gap compared to Windows, MacOS and Linux. Nor is the desktop market interesting. FreeBSD lives from volunteer developers, and most don't find the desktop an interesting problem to work on. The foundation gets lots of donations from big users of FreeBSD, but they don't use it on the desktop. One of the underlying problems is that FreeBSD has always been associated with the core systems research community, and GUI is not a topic of systems research, so those people who are the greatest experts on BSD internals (the ones that publish papers at SOSP, ASPLOS and OSDI) and give talks at Usenix are not the ones that care about windows, mouse clicks, and installers. They are the people who are happy that they don't have to toggle the OS into the front panel switches any longer.

A few hobbyists are trying to keep desktop usage viable on FreeBSD (same with OpenBSD, I don't know about NetBSD). That's honorable and appreciated. Helping them would be an interesting idea, but that's not where my personal interest lies.



kpedersen said:


> This was interesting. Did BSD not get a C++ compiler until quite late? I assumed cfront was going to be on BSD before most other platforms.


BSD had cfront from very early on. But by the early 90, cfront was eclipsed (pun!) by gcc and the commercial compilers (vendor-specific like HP or IBM, and Portland Group). Cfront was mostly used by the research and language community, and was not practical for production. For a long time, gcc was only useful on x86, since on other hardware platforms, the vendor-specific compilers generated much better code.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> And failing. This is the key part.


So, GhostBSD is failing?


----------



## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> So, GhostBSD is failing?


GhostBSD only succeeds as much as FreeBSD does.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> What do you mean by "pull ahead"? Achieve higher market share? That's flat out impossible. Look, the market share of Linux is 100% among supercomputers, 99% on non-windows servers. That ship has sailed decades ago, the decision was made when nearly everyone embraced Linux in the mid 90s. Among desktops, the market share of Linux is tiny (about 2%, give or take 1%), and the market share of FreeBSD is one or two orders of magnitude lower. Again, catching up with Linux is not possible.
> 
> Nor is it desirable. The world is not about being a race. Winning doesn't mean being the richest person or fastest runner. It means being good at what you do. FreeBSD is good at being a tight, well-engineered niche operating system. Leaving that niche would destroy it. If you really want to see FreeBSD deployed on lots of desktops, who is going to be doing the support? Where do you find companies like RedHat and Suse that offer paid support to millions of users? In the desktop market, FreeBSD has no advantages, many disadvantages, and a gigantic (unsurmountable) gap compared to Windows, MacOS and Linux. Nor is the desktop market interesting. FreeBSD lives from volunteer developers, and most don't find the desktop an interesting problem to work on. The foundation gets lots of donations from big users of FreeBSD, but they don't use it on the desktop. One of the underlying problems is that FreeBSD has always been associated with the core systems research community, and GUI is not a topic of systems research, so those people who are the greatest experts on BSD internals (the ones that publish papers at SOSP, ASPLOS and OSDI) and give talks at Usenix are not the ones that care about windows, mouse clicks, and installers. They are the people who are happy that they don't have to toggle the OS into the front panel switches any longer.
> 
> A few hobbyists are trying to keep desktop usage viable on FreeBSD (same with OpenBSD, I don't know about NetBSD). That's honorable and appreciated. Helping them would be an interesting idea, but that's not where my personal interest lies.


Fair enough.


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## shkhln (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> This person also fails to acknowledge that all required desktop infrastrucutre (DRM, Mesa3d, libinput, WINE, X11/Wayland, etc) are upstream Linux,


Wine (note the spelling) actually treats FreeBSD very fairly, they don't really see themself as a primarily Linux project.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> So, this persons entire argument is based on the premise that there is a demand for an OOTB experience (which we all already agreed upon), and that developers are oblivious and/or ignorant of this demand. The committers have been discussing this demand for years, and they've consistently (at various Conferences) explained why this endeavor is a hard task to execute. This person also fails to acknowledge that all required desktop infrastrucutre (DRM, Mesa3d, libinput, WINE, X11/Wayland, etc) are upstream Linux, and that simply chasing upstream is a zero sum game; yet the developers have made strides to provide said libraries for FreeBSD. It's also worth noting that ABI/API stability is a MUST with regards to shipping libraries in base.
> 
> At this point, replying to this person is akin to talking to a brick wall. They simply don't get it, or they're willfully naive and/or ignorant of the entire predicament.


Actually, that's not my argument, at all. My actual argument is that every time a user mentions how the user experience could be better, you guys try to stifle that user. I also said that my argument isn't with the developers. You're trying your best to paint my argument as something that it's not. So, no I'm not being willfully ignorant, but YOU are being intellectually dishonest.


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## shkhln (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> My actual argument is that every time a user mentions how the user experience could be better, you guys try to stifle that user.


The experience can always be better. This a useless truism at best. We are not on a circlejerk forum.


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## kpedersen (Jan 14, 2021)

A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> So, GhostBSD is failing?


Obviously I wish the project well but the very fact that you are on this forum and not theirs suggests that they haven't managed to quite capture so many users such as yourself. Why is that?

GhostBSD actually make a lot of good decisions. For example, it is not just some Gnome 3 mess. It actually looks usable. However I believe they would be better if they stayed closer to FreeBSD rather than going their own route. The closest example I can give is the relationship between DropLine Gnome and Slackware: http://www.droplinegnome.org/
Perhaps even a collection of ports / packages that install to /usr/ghost_local or something so that the desktop bits doesn't pollute the rest of the system but a user can still benefit from it. Similar to /usr/dt. So those *few* users who want a full blown desktop environment can easily install it.

Also, for the record, I am quite interested in graphics and desktop usability. I am even developing a fairly substantial remote desktop system based on FreeBSD, as well as my own GUI library. However, FreeBSD aside, the free-software community is so far away from having a good desktop UI that I think it would actively damage FreeBSD to try to include things like Gtk, Qt and Wayland inside it. Perhaps once Gnome 3 and Wayland has finally run its course and something good has replaced it, then perhaps FreeBSD could even consider looking at recommending a GUI. Even now, for an average user, Linux is still a joke. At least by remaining completely unknown, FreeBSD retains the benefit of the doubt XD


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## Beastie7 (Jan 14, 2021)

shkhln said:


> Wine (note the spelling) actually treats FreeBSD very fairly, they don't really see themself as a primarily Linux project.



Oh, that's great! I retract that then. 



A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> My actual argument is that every time a user mentions how the user experience could be better, you guys try to stifle that user.





A. D. Sharpe Sr. said:


> The only issue was that FBSD isn't providing it.



Oh so we're moving goalposts now. A lot of us have previously raised the same issues regarding the desktop. You're not the first. Again, you're in the wrong place; speak with the developers. I'm sure they'll be happy to reiterate the same stuff we're telling you here.


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Jan 14, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> Oh so we're moving goalposts now. A lot of us have previously raised the same issues regarding the desktop. You're not the first. Again, you're in the wrong place; speak with the developers. I'm sure they'll be happy to reiterate the same stuff we're telling you here.


You're trying to mix 2 statements from 2 separate replies to 2 separate statements. In order for it to be moving the goalposts, they would have to be for the same argument -but they're not. It's clear that you're not actually reading the thread fully. But I've made my point, so I digress.


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## Snurg (Jan 14, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> It takes developers away from work that needs to be done on the core system.


Honestly, I don't have the impression that the 'name-stealers' who take FreeBSD, slap a preconfigured DM over it and claim it SomeMogelpackungBSD contribute much to the core system.



ralphbsz said:


> The vast majority of people contributing to Linux are employees who do so as their job. Intel, IBM, Oracle, RedHat, Microsoft, Samsung, Suse, and so on.


It is always good to look where something was made by whom and why.
How much big evil is in it.



ralphbsz said:


> Linux... ...the installer was awful...  ... distribution (34 floppy disks!)...
> ...on BSD, you needed to have an exact model video card (the Tseng ET4000)...


I knew very very few diehards who were able to stand the eyestrain of 56Hz refresh of 800x600 or 43 Hz interlaced 1024x768 for extended periods that the Tseng was able to support.
At FreeBSD 1.0 CDROM release 1994 there was no support for S3 etc, so GUI was no fun at all.
This at a time where Macs and Windows already commonly worked at at least 70, 75Hz upward.
I became a regular user only since FBSD 4.x.


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## tuaris (Jan 15, 2021)

I probably shouldn't, but I will anyway..

In no particular order, as of 2021, I categorize (this non-exhaustive list of) OS's as follows:
(I won't get into embedded platforms)

Mobile

- Android
- Chrome OS
- iOS

Desktop/Laptop

- Windows
- MacOS

Workstation

- FreeBSD
- Windows
- Fedora (and derivatives)
- Debian (and derivatives)

Server

- FreeBSD
- Debian (and derivatives)
- Fedora (and derivatives)
- SUSE

FreeBSD makes for a great workstation and server OS.  Windows and Macintosh currently own the desktop space, but I think that will change once HaikuOS gains some ground.  Linux, while it currently seems to be winning at mobile is actually trying to be all those things and (in my opinion) failing.

The point is that each OS has a target platform, and people mistakenly treat workstations and desktops as the same.  There is a huge difference between the two and once that is understood you realize that Unix/Linux wasn't designed to be a desktop operating system.

For me, the ideal world would (have) be/been:

Palm/Web OS for my mobile devices
FreeBSD for my servers
HaikuOS for my desktop

btw, I currently 'try' to use FreeBSD as a desktop OS with the help of this script I maintain: https://github.com/tuaris/freebsd-desktop


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 15, 2021)

Snurg That has nothing to do with what I said. He asked why developers aren't working on graphical UIs and that is what I replied to.


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## a6h (Jan 15, 2021)

I see some confusions about nature of open source projects on this thread.
Mr. McKusick has a great presentation on: How open source projects work.
I can't remember the title, but video is on Internet, and you can easily STFW.

.BTW, It's FreeBSD, not FBSD.


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## Factor (Jan 26, 2021)

Very interesting read.


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## foxdie99 (Feb 4, 2021)

One of the reasons the Linux Desktop is so sucessfull seems to be the distribution explosion. People wanting different things leads to inovation I think.
GhostBSD is a FreeBSD Distribution (They deliver the FreeBSD Core, of course they use openRC, but the init system is different topic) that tries to solve the lack of Desktop "problem" in FreeBSD. This is wonderfull.
FreeBSD can focus on developing its wonderfull OS (Kernel + Userland) and other distributions can contribute to the desktop world.

I was tired of jumping from distribution to distribution in the Linux world, so I started my own GNU/linux with the Linux from Scratch project. It gave me the ability to understand how a bare system is built and the potential behind it. I gave up on it because I should support distributions which contribute to the forward momentum of the upstream!

I like GNU/Debian but if I (and others) use GNU/Ubuntu because of their Desktop focus (do not missunderstand here actual desktop developments like Gnome and KDE) things are bound to reach Debian Base some when! That is actually true today!

I hope some day GhostBSD will answer the prayers of many users who which to have an easy solution for a FreeBSD Desktop, by contributing their improvements to the FreeBSD.

That said, leave FreeBSD alone! It is going forward as it can to provide a Stable and Reliable System! If want a specific feature, make a FreeBSD distribution and focus on that direction until you have a wonderfull thing for the Core team to implement!

PS: It is a nice topic, just a bit misguided.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

foxdie99 said:


> I was tired of jumping from distribution to distribution in the Linux world, so I started my own GNU/linux with the Linux from Scratch project. It gave me the ability to understand how a bare system is built and the potential behind it. I gave up on it because I should support distributions which contribute to the forward momentum of the upstream!



As you have found out, no distribution can cater for all user needs, which leads to the hobby of distro jumping.
The nice thing about FreeBSD is that it is almost like the "Linux from scratch" approach. And yet, it is also the upstream.


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## foxdie99 (Feb 4, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> As you have found out, no distribution can cater for all user needs, which leads to the hobby of distro jumping.
> The nice thing about FreeBSD is that it is almost like the "Linux from scratch" approach. And yet, it is also the upstream.


Exactly!


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## malco_2001 (Feb 5, 2021)

As the author of FuryBSD the LiveCD builder I wanted to come back here at some point and give an update.  From my point of view I made a LiveCD builder which automated the task of booting to a desktop environment.  I don’t know any programming language but shell scripting so I took it as far as I could.

At some point Simon Peter the author of AppImage came along, wrote a very nice article, started filing tickets, starting pull requests, adding CI, adding a graphical installer.  A little later because of that more developers started to contribute, and join the conversations in IRC.  During this time I was also encouraging Simon to fork FuryBSD for HelloSystem in the hopes that he could quickly adapt to keep going on his own with a little guidance on how things worked.     

Having contributed a rewrite of GhostBSD LiveCD prior to this as I was winding down FuryBSD I decided to work with that project to contribute improvements once again so that my effort could come full circle.  I even took the time to fix some unrelated things like broken OpenRC scripts for VMware in GhostBSD, and some other errors at boot which just interested me to help fix.  These were things I learned how to do from helping the TrueOS, and PC-BSD projects also.

Is FuryBSD really dead?  I say as an inexperienced programmer who did this in my spare time I consider it an achievement to have initially developed something that allowed something like HelloSystem to be created.  I think that’s the entire point, and mission statement of making software open source.  Of course I wish these other projects, or future projects the best, and hope that they can stick around longer than mine.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 5, 2021)

I had no idea helloSystem had that much influence. Interesting. I definitely support what Simon is doing, and share his insights.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 5, 2021)

malco_2001 said:


> Is FuryBSD really dead?  I say as an inexperienced programmer who did this in my spare time I consider it an achievement to have initially developed something that allowed something like HelloSystem to be created.  I think that’s the entire point, and mission statement of making software open source.  Of course I wish these other projects, or future projects the best, and hope that they can stick around longer than mine.


You are to be commended for the work you did, IMO.

I was part of PC-BSD from the beta stage and remember how things were then. I stayed with them as a tester after it went mainstream to keep learning BSD. I left the forums for 2 years to study a wider range of topics and increase my computer knowledge in the trenches.

When I returned X-Systems had bought in and things had changed markedly in the way they were run and handled. Not for the better and that's more than my opinion already stated .

You did what you did without the resources they had. I tried Fury out and it  was alright. It wasn't for me but FreeBSD isn't for a lot of people. My Sister works at a computer all day but readily admits she couldn't follow my Tutorial to set one up. She knows the Program she uses, when it needs worked on she calls and somebody like me comes to do it.

Fury would give people the same break I got with PC-BSD and needed to get to the desktop, It's good GhostBSD is around but I like building mine from ground up.

I'm trying to teach two people in my building to use FreeBSD now. Both at different ends of the scale.

One has a Degree in Computer Science -Communications. He could probably cut you some nice cable and I can talk to him in terminology I use here, but he has watched me through the build process and couldn't sit down and run mine yet.

That's what he wants though. The sense of accomplishment that will come with building it himself. I'm teaching him ports, i told him pkg may be better for him but it was the Handbook he would learn that from.

The other has never used a computer before.  I figured if he was going to learn it might as well be BSD if I'm teaching him. I gave him my i386 box with a working version of 11.2. on it.  He can't  type to enter his own password, but I am patient with him as the other guy. I had to change it to 22222 so he could get logged in to where he could start learning on his own. I've still got root.

Both will have different questions and I'll work with both as long as it takes if they show me  they are working to learn.

But Fury or GhostBSD not for them.


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## Samuel Venable (Feb 5, 2021)

I find with NomadBSD and GhostBSD are still going strong, and helloSystem is a nice addition to the mix. I think while it's not pleasant FuryBSD got killed off, I happen to like what I've seen of helloSystem and find it would appeal to more users.


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## wb7odyfred (Feb 8, 2021)

If you want a BSD with a MATE desktop, look at GhostBSD.org .  Download the .ISO ,. 'Dd' into a usb flash drive.  Then boot from usb flash drive to run the live image.  Like what you are using,. Use 'gbi' GhostBSD Installer to install the 'ZFS' file system onto a single partition.   

Welcome and tryout GhostBSD.  Nomadbsd.org is another desktop BSD that runs from usb flash drive.


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## tuxador (Feb 8, 2021)

GhostBSD is different from furyBSD in my humble opinion because it's not just a "plain" FreeBSD, whearas furybsd is a vanilla FreeBSD with a graphic installer.
I tried before to convert a ghostBSD into  a plain FreeBSD without succes.


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## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 10, 2021)

This looks promising:






						helloSystem Wants To Be The "macOS of BSDs" With A Polished Desktop Experience - Phoronix
					






					www.phoronix.com


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 10, 2021)

failure said:


> This looks promising:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I thought it was a new Instant Messenger app those young whippersnappers came up with. 

Now to find out it's another attempt for a more viable FreeBSD clone using a Mac gene. How about SystemHello? Might make it sound more UNIX like. Or is that in the petri dish stage mutating?


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## Beastie7 (Feb 10, 2021)

I heard an apple fell on his head one day, and realized how broken Linux was. The fact that he's the creator of the AppImage band aid is even more satisfying.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 10, 2021)

The Applemage strode onto the battle field only to be turned into sauce by the AppleSage. Hello?


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## scottro (Feb 10, 2021)

I tried it on a USB stick. I think it was based on 12.1 and it didn't recognize my wireless card. Unlike many people here (waves to Dr. H), I think that such efforts are a good thing and will pay off for FreeBSD. There are lots of downsides to popularity. (Debates claiming to be a famous person in real life, then realizes it's too easy to check). But, I really think that one reason Linux became so well supported by both hardware and software vendors was Ubuntu's making it easy to use. Back when it first came out, it was fairly unique  in that respect. Ubuntu, I've heard, is a Swahili word, that translates as I'm too lazy to configure Debian.


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## Lamia (Feb 10, 2021)

scottro said:


> Ubuntu, I've heard, is a Swahili word, that translates as I'm too lazy to configure Debian.


I'm fuming! Is that the translation and meaning of Ubuntu as in the Ubuntu Spirit?
Lost in translation!!!


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## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 10, 2021)

Trihexagonal said:


> The Applemage strode onto the battle field only to be turned into sauce by the AppleSage. Hello?


I don't know what you mean but I like AppImage more than Snap or Flatpak. Just feel like the old day with single executable portable Windows apps, created by tools like VMware ThinApp or Cameyo. Nowadays PortableApps rules the portable apps market on Windows.

BTW, we used to have something very similar to this, PBI or something? My first taste of FreeBSD is of PC-BSD Isotope.


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## scottro (Feb 10, 2021)

Just to make sure everyone realizes, that translation of Ubuntu is just a joke. I believe its actual meaning is Unity, but I'm too lazy to check right now.


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## Lamia (Feb 10, 2021)

scottro said:


> Just to make sure everyone realizes, that translation of Ubuntu is just a joke. I believe its actual meaning is Unity, but I'm too lazy to check right now.


Merci!!


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## Mjölnir (Feb 10, 2021)

scottro said:


> [...] I really think that one reason Linux became so well supported by both hardware and software vendors was Ubuntu's making it easy to use. [...]


If we spend ½ the time we're hanging around here to work creating _FreeBSD Community Edition_ (& sub projects _Kommunity, Xommunity, Qommunity, Gommunity_ for KDE/XfCE/LxQt/Gnome GUI), we might achieve a FreeBSD desktop "distro" that attracts newbies (incl. non-techies).  But I'm staying away from one man shows (like FuryBSD was) & I'm for shure not going to start another one.  See  this thread.


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## Jose (Feb 10, 2021)

Mjölnir said:


> If we spend ½ the time we're hanging around here to work creating _FreeBSD Community Edition_ (& sub projects _Kommunity, Xommunity, Qommunity, Gommunity_ for KDE/XfCE/LxQt/Gnome GUI), we might achieve a FreeBSD desktop "distro" that attracts newbies (incl. non-techies).  But I'm staying away from one man shows (like FuryBSD was) & I'm for shure not going to start another one.  See  this thread.


There are a lot of people with good ideas for how to spend my time. You'll have to get in line. I'm at the head of line, BTW.

Edit: And my wife is right behind me.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 10, 2021)

Mjölnir said:


> If we spend ½ the time we're hanging around here to work creating _FreeBSD Community Edition_ (& sub projects _Kommunity, Xommunity, Qommunity, Gommunity_ for KDE/XfCE/LxQt/Gnome GUI), we might achieve a FreeBSD desktop "distro" that attracts newbies (incl. non-techies).  But I'm staying away from one man shows (like FuryBSD was) & I'm for shure not going to start another one.  See  this thread.





scottro said:


> I'm too lazy



Btw, I just gave Xfce another go with 4.16. Really clean and simple with the GTK3 update. More so than KDE. I'd back it as a default with FreeBSD, debian-style. I call it the pottery of DEs.. cupertino-style, redmond-style, whatever-style. Just use those hands sir.


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## Argentum (Feb 10, 2021)

Mjölnir said:


> If we spend ½ the time we're hanging around here to work creating _FreeBSD Community Edition_ (& sub projects _Kommunity, Xommunity, Qommunity, Gommunity_ for KDE/XfCE/LxQt/Gnome GUI), we might achieve a FreeBSD desktop "distro" that attracts newbies (incl. non-techies).  But I'm staying away from one man shows (like FuryBSD was) & I'm for shure not going to start another one.  See  this thread.


Agree with this, but it is hard to achieve. Maintaining a desktop "distro" is a hard job and needs stable organization. The people, who already have a FreeBSD desktop do not see any reason to commit, and the people who do not use FreeBSD on desktop need to install their own desktops first before they are able to commit. A dead circle - *Ouroboros*.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 10, 2021)

Someone on twitter brought up the idea of the Ghost/Midnight/NomadBSD devs congregating around the helloSystem project. It looks promising. Who knows.


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## scottro (Feb 10, 2021)

I remember, when FreeBSD hardware support was about the same as Linux's was (around the time of 4.x, I think), there was a great little live CD (probably USB too, but at that time, think I was more likely to use CDs) called FreeSBIE or something like that. It would keep up with the FreeBSD release, so it was a nice quick accurate test of how your hardware would work with an actual FreeBSD install.  It ran fluxbox, so the GUI didn't slow things up very much. I guess lxde is probably the lightest of the desktop environments, as opposed to window managers like fluxbox and openbox, and might be a good choice.

Anyway, easy for me to type, and wait for others to do the work.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 10, 2021)

scottro said:


> as opposed to window managers like fluxbox and *openbox*, and might be a good choice.



A CrunchBang BSD is just waiting to exist. C'mon guys!


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## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 11, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> Someone on twitter brought up the idea of the Ghost/Midnight/NomadBSD devs congregating around the helloSystem project. It looks promising. Who knows.


Unfortunately, I think this will* never* happen.


----------



## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 11, 2021)

scottro said:


> Anyway, easy for me to type, and wait for others to do the work.


+1

I tried to persuade the MX Linux devs to create a MX BSD version but failed miserably. In the mind of Linux people, other alternative OSes just non-existent. There are only Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

If I have the knowledge (another way to say I'm not going to do it but just talk and waiting for others to do it), I would grab the MX Linux sources (art-work, need permission from them, their utilities, mx-tools, mx-packageinstaller,...) and make MX BSD myself (which almost will never happen).

MX BSD could exist in my wet dream, though.

Yes, typing is easy!


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## fraxamo (Feb 11, 2021)

Hello system, a FreeBSD-based OS designed to resemble Mac


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 14, 2021)

failure said:


> I don't know what you mean but I like AppImage more than Snap or Flatpak. Just feel like the old day with single executable portable Windows apps, created by tools like VMware ThinApp or Cameyo. Nowadays PortableApps rules the portable apps market on Windows.



I was making fun of Apple and the name they used.


failure said:


> BTW, we used to have something very similar to this, PBI or something? My first taste of FreeBSD is of PC-BSD Isotope.



PC-BSD Isotope 9.0. Then you might know me from posting in the forum. I was a beta tester from PC-BSD v.73 and left a few months after that version was released. 

I only remember a guy named White Lightning I liked and talked to in the forums. He was the only one who showed any interest or seemed to understand what I was talking about. Oko remembered me but only me as somebody ranting about something, not who I was.

You would have known me as Weixiong. Someone they would have just as soon be forgotten along with what I knew but had let die from BSD memory. When they realized Trihexagonal was Weixiong to them they their best and went to extremes to make it happen by ghosting everything PC-BSD along with 7 years of my life. Try finding the wiki, forums, or anything PC-BSD. You won't because they no longer exist.

But I do. I'm jitte and to ghost me is beyond their power:









						PC-BSD 9.0 Isotope Firewall Manager breaks pf firewall
					

When editing default pf firewall rules through the Firewall Manager GUI in PC-BSD 9.0 Isotope from "pass" to "block" there is a syntax error that...




					www.wilderssecurity.com
				




That's what you get for trying to ghost a Daemon, shortstuff. FuryBSD is more a worthwhile effort and malco_2001 worthy of trust and praise they are not.


----------



## scottro (Feb 14, 2021)

Is that a Chinese word? Jitte in Japanese is a medieval police weapon. (Also called jutte).
Idle curiosity.

I was also active in the beginning on pcbsd forums, I think that somewhere in my scientifically named oldstuff, there's still an interview with Kris Moore for an online BSD magazine, not sure if it managed to produce an issue or not. Gosh, I've gotten old. :-(  This was way back when, when PCBSD first started.


----------



## GoNeFast_01 (Feb 15, 2021)

I am on the same boat we need to make it more accessible. Having said that, I am using it on my server environment (I hate GUI for that use as I am trying to squeeze as much from my server resources), and in my local Desktop it did took me forever/2 weekends due to my specific X11 setup (4 Screen / 3 GPU),  but like previous have said is fairly easy to install GUI environment just requires some reading = X11 + Environment of Choice.

I am going to throw this out there because I am loving what these guys are doing:

ARCAN = This is what I want to use on my next test server build, make a compile FREEBSD + Durden Environment.

http://durden.arcan-fe.com/
https://arcan-fe.com/videos/










						Steps to get up and running with Arcan on FreeBSD
					

Steps to get up and running with Arcan on FreeBSD. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.




					gist.github.com


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## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 15, 2021)

Trihexagonal said:


> You would have known me as Weixiong.
> ...
> FuryBSD is more a worthwhile effort and malco_2001 worthy of trust and praise they are not.


Yeah I remember this name. But that time I think you are just another Chinese folk. There are a lot of Chinese users of FreeBSD. It's easy to know because of their pinyin based account name.

I'm on the other hand don't value FuryBSD much. It's somewhat similar to another effort of the NetBSD users, OS108. I always prefer GhostBSD more. I think FuryBSD is not any better than your install desktop script.

I know there is NomadBSD, too, but I never liked it.


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## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 15, 2021)

helloSystem releases new ISOs






						helloSystem Releases New ISOs For This macOS-Inspired BSD Desktop OS - Phoronix
					






					www.phoronix.com


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 15, 2021)

scottro said:


> Is that a Chinese word? Jitte in Japanese is a medieval police weapon. (Also called jutte).
> Idle curiosity.



It's Japanese for 10 Hands and my given name since the 80's. It's always been my usr name and considered my real name no matter what name I use.

Sword Breaker in your spelling for a weapon to catch and break the sword still used by Police today. My spelling to mean like having 10 Hands, te meaning hand as in empty hand. Correctly pronounced jit -ta with the A sound, mine sounds like it's spelled.


scottro said:


> I was also active in the beginning on pcbsd forums, I think that somewhere in my scientifically named oldstuff, there's still an interview with Kris Moore for an online BSD magazine, not sure if it managed to produce an issue or not. Gosh, I've gotten old. :-(  This was way back when, when PCBSD first started.



I have beta disks v 0.73, v 0.75, PC-BSD v 1.5 and pick up at PC-BSD 7. Your pf guide is how I learned to use it and we talked before back then. I remember Jules, too.

Nobody said anything or spoke up but me though when the GUI they implemented broke pf. I found the bug, reported it in a post, demonstrated it and showed how to fix it on the user end by use of a simple 2 line ruleset to replace it. I was totally ignored and got no response from the Moore Bros or Dru for 2 months in either of two posts I made so they could not miss the ruckus I raised.

When some guy joined who said he was going to deploy it to run his business, thinking he had a working firewall, I was done with being ignored. I took it to where I knew my voice would be heard and it didn't take them long to hear it for themselves when I posted at Wilders, or get a patch issued when they had intended to wait till the next release.

That's a black mark on their character the black sheep quiet about after fingering them for their failure to the flock that followed them faithfully. I never spoke of it here or would have out of Professionalism and the time I had invested in it.

If not for them trying to Ghost me for fear I would make it known did they suffer the consequences of it becoming known. It's one of my standard lesson plans and the result of their own actions.

Class dismissed.


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## scottro (Feb 15, 2021)

Glad to hear the guide helped someone, even if it is years old by now. I think I was out of PCBSD by that time of the firewall incident, I feel as if I would have remembered it. 

I would argue with your pronunciation of te being ta, at least in standard Japanese.  Often words get changed in a dialect and I wonder if that's the reason you use ta.  Could it be Okinawan?  (Just asking, and nostalgically  remembering the days of AOL martial arts mailing lists, where people would start challenging others to a fight over such things.  I'm old and weak, so I'm *not* challenging).

Wikipedia is writing jutte as 十手, the 10 hands. I think that's the standard spelling for the weapon too. Anyway, I like the name, and I'm sure there's an interesting story behind you adapting it. 
As I've aged, I have lost multitasking ability, so I'm envious.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 17, 2021)

scottro said:


> Glad to hear the guide helped someone, even if it is years old by now. I think I was out of PCBSD by that time of the firewall incident, I feel as if I would have remembered it.



You must have left by then. I'm sure you would have remembered if you were there because you would have known what I was talking about and spoke up, too. I posted a screenshot of the error thrown to my photobucket account as jitte nusumi (nusumi = stealing hand) but it's long gone:

keep state on block rules doesn't make sense
skipping rule due to errors
rule expands to no valid combination
pfctl: Syntax error in config file: pf rules not loaded


scottro said:


> I would argue with your pronunciation of te being ta, at least in standard Japanese.  Often words get changed in a dialect and I wonder if that's the reason you use ta.  Could it be Okinawan?  (Just asking, and nostalgically  remembering the days of AOL martial arts mailing lists, where people would start challenging others to a fight over such things.  I'm old and weak, so I'm *not* challenging).
> 
> Wikipedia is writing jutte as 十手, the 10 hands. I think that's the standard spelling for the weapon too. Anyway, I like the name, and I'm sure there's an interesting story behind you adapting it.
> As I've aged, I have lost multitasking ability, so I'm envious.


Since you asked, jitte is a Shotokan black belt kata where you practice defense movements against someone with a staff and take it away from them. Start and ending in the same place or you're not doing it right:





_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTFKXpmyPus_


I posted a video of this guy breaking a board with his fingertips. I could never do that or what he does here. But I could walk up, set and break one hanging on a string like that with a reverse punch. No measuring, no drawing, just smack it. And where the name comes from:





_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXODb4fRDM0_


Here is the jutte and they spell it both ways:






						Jutte - Black Belt Wiki
					

Jutte (Jitte) – Japanese Martial Arts Weapon The Jutte (or Jitte) is a Japanese martial arts weapon similar to the Sai. However, while the Sai is traditionally used in pairs, the Jutte is a single weapon. While this martial arts weapon is relatively obscure today, it is used by a martial arts...




					blackbeltwiki.com
				




ka-ra-ta as pronounced by a Japanese speaker. That's the sound I was trying to get across:






						Google Translate
					

Google's service, offered free of charge, instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages.




					translate.google.com
				




I'm old now, too.


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## scottro (Feb 17, 2021)

Hrrm, when I was studying Japanese (when I was doing martial arts), I usually heard it pronounced te, like eh, I guess.  That's pretty good, being able to break a free hanging board. I want to think that I might have been able to do that in my prime, but never tried. it. '

To try to keep out of trouble, and put this back on topic, I may as well mention that in one of these desktop threads, I mentioned that hellosystem was based on 12.1 and not working properly with my T495's wireless. However, they now have a 12.2 based one. I ran it from a USB, and for those who like Mac, it might be a good choice. They do make it resemble a Mac, and basic stuff I tried (youtube video, though I didn't try netflix, prime, or others requiring widevine), browsing and so on, worked pretty well.


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## Deleted member 66267 (Feb 17, 2021)

scottro said:


> ...and basic stuff I tried (youtube video, though I didn't try netflix, prime, or others requiring widevine), browsing and so on, worked pretty well.


It's worked well for me on any FreeBSD derivatives (Ghost, Nomad,...) and FreeBSD itself. Not a surprise if helloSystem just worked. My hardware is old and well supported.


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