# The status of the graphics stack on FreeBSD



## getopt (Feb 8, 2015)

Here is a presentation held by one of our four(!) Developers held on  10 October, 2014 at XDC2014. While it is worth being noticed, it has not found its way to our attention:


> Today, FreeBSD is well behind Linux in the graphics stack area, but the community regains interest in the topic. Users want a beautiful and friendly desktop environment on their shiny new laptop, they want to try this Wayland thing all their Linux buddies talk about, and above all, they want to mine virtual currency and be rich!
> 
> But all of this comes with a price: contributors and users hit critical problems due to the gap with Linux. Some of them are technical, some are human. Right now, the Linux community leads developments and we need to learn again how the graphics stack work from top to bottom.
> 
> After a short history of major changes, the presentation goes through the current situation in the kernel, the packages and with our users. It then concludes with the actions taken and planned to restore a nice desktop experience on FreeBSD and, in the long term, be part of the developments, side by side with not only the Linux community but other platforms too.



Slides and video are available here: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2014/XDC2014PedronFreeBSD/ 

Make sure you make it in the 2nd half of the video if you want to know about the FreeBSD specific problems and for an outlook in the future of Xorg on FreeBSD.

Elsewhere in this forums there is a lot of discussion going on if there is a need for systemd for FreeBSD. My impression from the video is, that this will not happen anytime soon. Why? Make up your mind yourself.

For those who are interested how kernel drivers are in sync with Linux see here:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#Kernel_drivers

An updated blog can be read here:
http://blogs.freebsdish.org/graphics/

Keep in mind that those few developers are working spare-time serving the FreeBSD X-community. Don't they need more support from the community?


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