# When did people first start using BSD as a graphical desktop?



## isseeder96 (Jan 22, 2021)

When did people start using bsd as a desktop? I was poking around on archive.org for clues, and found only bits and pieces such as a dead link to an article

the dead link: 


			https://web.archive.org/web/20001202224500/http://www.bsdcentral.com/catalog/index.php?product=1010&id=CB2F5F3BC7FCC3FA10CAA1684730A663


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## SirDice (Jan 22, 2021)

isseeder96 said:


> When did people start using bsd as a desktop?


I had XFree86 running on FreeBSD 3.0. Does that count? I can even remember something I tried on 2.2. Back in the day XFree86 was a monolithic monstrosity, I think it took me two days to build. So I'm going to say right from the moment XFree86 was available on FreeBSD. The ports tree still has the history but unfortunately no date when it was added to the ports tree.

x11/XFree86


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## ralphbsz (Jan 22, 2021)

X11 ran on BSD before BSD split into 386BSD, BSDi, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and whatever else. It also ran on BSD-derived systems such as Ultrix. I remember running X on a DECstation (MIPS CPU) with Ultrix (which was fundamentally 4.2 or 4.3 BSD). That must have been about 1988.


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## a6h (Jan 22, 2021)

My experience: FreeBSD 6.2, around 2007. It was KDE 3 or somethings (I can't remember exactly which version it was). And I compiled it! hours and hours. It was hard And there was a great deal of reward. I didn't expect to have a working sound. But it worked. "Son of Man" i.e. Ozzy Osbourne's "Iron Man" covered by Marilyn Manson, was the first song which I played on FreeBSD machine, for weeks and weeks!


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## Beastie7 (Jan 23, 2021)

If you're using "BSD" loosely and "people" meaning consumers; the initial release of NeXTSTEP was back in 1989. This was an actual product, as well.


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## recluce (Jan 29, 2021)

For me, around 1994 or 1995 on FreeBSD 2.x. Desktop is relative though, there was some flavour of X running on a FreeBSD server, that I could access with my desktop at the company. I have no details, as I was not involved in system administration back then.

We had a very involved process to select our successor to SCO Unix: we got one Slackware CD (or was that SUSE?) and one FreeBSD CD. Linux failed to install, FreeBSD worked. The company is still using FreeBSD for most server applications today.


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## Samuel Venable (Jan 29, 2021)

Honestly, I wish I knew about FreeBSD for as long as a lot of you have! Sheesh. FreeBSD was born on my best friend's birthday, November 1st, not counting the year, and it is has been around for about as long as I've been alive.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Jan 29, 2021)

jan 14 2004, bsdbook.txt 902K, ... jan 16 2004 nano-1.2.2.zip...  

Ran dual boot 
here with windows98 first edition.  bought BSD for the usb drivers.  

So long ago I don't remember if that nano is meant for windows or bsd...


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## SirDice (Jan 29, 2021)

Samuel Venable said:


> I wish I knew about FreeBSD for as long as a lot of you have!











						imgur.com
					

1466 views on Imgur: The magic of the Internet




					imgur.com
				




Previous versions I downloaded. Back then you could download two floppy images, boot from those and install the rest over the internet. Tried to download an ISO image over a telephone connection when you still had to pay by the minute. Took the whole weekend (lower rates) and the transfer died Sunday evening at 96%  Monthly triple digit phone bills weren't fun either.


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## mark_j (Jan 29, 2021)

My first source of FreeBSD (actually 386BSD back then) was university, so I grabbed a tape (DDS if I recall).

In the early days, even with binaries released, I always built from source because the generic kernel was pretty lean and wanting specific SCSI support required it (I forget the cards, adaptec maybe?).

Later it was Walnut Creek CDs. Our home internet sucked 20 years ago so network downloads were just not an option.

A X window "desktop" has always been available. It was sparse, to say the least, 20 years ago and really only used so you could have multiple xterms open and the obligatory xeyes...


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## putney (Jan 29, 2021)

SunOS 1.0 (1983) was the first I saw. Our lab before that had a mix of Unix command-line terminals (with PDP11s) and dedicated workstations like the Perq. I hated SunOS in comparison, and scarcely used it. The Unix Haters Handbook (wikipedia) rants about moving from Lisp machines to BSD (IIRC) in 1994 - wonderful and funny foreword by Donald Norman. We had servers running SunOS, later moved them to Solaris then FreeBSD 1 or 2... that was very different.


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## Mjölnir (Jan 29, 2021)

My journey on BSD began when I had to set up a Mac mini (PPC) in an internet café (sort of).  The guy who gifted it told me that FreeBSD runs much better on that box than Linux.  But he took out the harddisk , so I had to install a new system.  Instead of trying Linux anyway, I trusted him and got a fresh release CD.  I was very pleased with FreeBSD's clean configuration philosophy and that most software ran smooth, e.g. KDE3.  Was there an issue with sound?  Dunno.  A while after, my private laptop running a very African Linux distribution crashed irrecoverably during an update...  That was when I switched completely to FreeBSD (PC-BSD), about 2007/8?  OK long before that I had a NeXTstation at work, but that's a different story because I didn't have to configure that OS like you have/can on (Free) BSD.


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## the3ajm (Jan 29, 2021)

I got mine installed when FreeBSD 10 was still supported and decided to go with a system that's different. I have used Debian/Ubuntu before so I dig into using my 2008 laptop to learn more about BSD but if I  need to run an application that's not available or something I've tried on FreeBSD that doesn't work I have  windows machine that I keep, but this 2008 laptop has been my primary source of work and general usage.

It's only been recent that I dropped KDE due to a bug issue with the dri kernel gpu issue. Previously I had to upgrade to 12.1 from 11.4 since there were packages that dropped support that kde desktop needs and now used xfce which loads fine.


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## olli@ (Jan 29, 2021)

SirDice said:


> The ports tree still has the history but unfortunately no date when it was added to the ports tree.


XFree86 hit the ports tree on 1995-01-05, see https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=710
At that time, FreeBSD was at version 2.0 (released on 1994-11-23).
Personally I started using it on FreeBSD 2.1.5, about one and a half year later. Now that’s almost exactly 25 years ago.


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## bsdimp (Jan 29, 2021)

People developed X on DEC hardware donated to project Athena running Ultrix and/or BSD 4.0. So 1984 is when people started using it, though to be fair it wasn't widely used until X10 in 1986... Prior to that people used research unix to create things like the BLT terminal (1982) which was running a 7th (later 8th) edition research unix. 7th Edition is the precursor to the BSD line and the 8th edition is BSD4.1 with some parts AT&T didn't like replaced. Sun's SunView was a graphical desktop as well, released in 1983 running on a 68000 which ran a port of 4BSD, but wasn't X. So the roots of desktop on BSD go back to the very earliest days of it being a thing... I didn't start using SunView until 1986 though and we could choose between it and X10R3...


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## BostonBSD (Jan 29, 2021)

It seems like a lot of people start out with Linux.  For a true 1990s Linux experience they should try Arch Linux, their methods of installing the system and using chroot are exactly like I remember.  Anyways, so far as desktops go Ubuntu always seems like the easiest to just get a Unix like system up and running.

However, after a period when things start to malfunction, the ease of use starts to fade into a giant unmanageable ball of confusion.

This is about the time when Unix-like users start looking for something simpler, more stable, less overhead, etc. They could either go with a low overhead Linux distro such as Arch or something like Slackware or they could go with a BSD system.

I chose BSD mostly because it's more centralized, better documented, more consistent, etc. They don't have as much of a selection of software, however, they have all of the software I require. They also appear to have much greater commercial support than these other low overhead Linux distros. They don't appear to be on the bleeding edge as much as Linux, although the release systems always appear to work [if they don't work fixing it isn't very difficult].

So long as FreeBSD supports my hardware, I probably would always choose it first, it's just so easy to install, configure, and fix [everything really is just a binary or a text file]. I'm going to install it on a Raspberry PI next, for these same reasons [I like Pine64 more, but it's more expensive and less capable with FreeBSD, a 1-2 watt computer is too tempting to pass up].


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## BostonBSD (Feb 2, 2021)

Some people like automatics, some people like manual transmissions.  
MacOS is sort of like an automatic, FreeBSD is the same thing with a manual transmission.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2021)

BostonBSD said:


> They don't have as much of a selection of software, however, they have all of the software I require.


An important point most people ignore. Out of the 10,000 editors out there, you only need one and most people choose one of a very few, and it's available on FreeBSD.


BostonBSD said:


> They don't appear to be on the bleeding edge as much as Linux


FreeBSD out performs Linux in networking and holds its own for applications. FreeBSD does not jump on the latest fad if that's what you mean and prefers stability over throwing things together. But, as you said, everything one typically needs is there and performs as well or better on FreeBSD.


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## hruodr (Feb 3, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> X11 ran on BSD before BSD split into 386BSD, BSDi, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and whatever else.


With what OS was developed X11 at MIT?

People may also ask, since when has BSD internet.


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## vermaden (Feb 3, 2021)

isseeder96 said:


> When did people start using bsd as a desktop?



I started in 2005 with FreeBSD 5.4 ...


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## Crivens (Feb 3, 2021)

I started in '96 or '97 with NetBSD 1.2 from the Gateway CDs. Using fvwm2 as a DE an starting reading the kernel source. Marvels, can be read and understood. Tried that text adventure known as emacs, failed miserably. Good times. These days, one is more interested in the early retirement plan.


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## olli@ (Feb 3, 2021)

hruodr said:


> With what OS was developed X11 at MIT?


With BSD, of course.    The X development was part of Project Athena. At that time (1984), they were running 4.2BSD on a number of microcomputers and minicomputers such as the DEC VAX-11/750.
 


> People may also ask, since when has BSD internet.


Since the internet started to exist, basically. Although, it depends on what you call “internet”. Personally, I regard the flag day on 1983-01-01 as the starting point of the internet, because that is the time when the ARPANET switched to the internet protocol.
 
4.2BSD in 1983 was the first UNIX system that supported the internet protocol (IP), via the famous Berkeley sockets API. In fact, the interim release 4.1a in 1982 already included preliminary TCP/IP support – at a time when the ARPANET still used NCP instead of the “modern” TCP/IP.
 
You can read about all of that on Wikipedia and other websites about the history of computing and networking. With just a little bit of research, you could have answered your questions yourself.


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## hruodr (Feb 3, 2021)

olli@ said:


> You can read about all of that on Wikipedia and other websites about the history of computing and networking. With just a little bit of research, you could have answered your questions yourself.


Rhetorical questions do not need an answer.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 3, 2021)

That's interesting. I'm curious though, was Wayland a solution to design issues with the X11 protocol, or the X.Org implementation of the protocol? I'm having a hard time understanding why Wayland (the protocol) exists in the first place.


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## a6h (Feb 3, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> why Wayland (the protocol) exists in the first place.


Most new ideas are stupid and dangerous. Wayland is one of them. Though,
Most old ideas are stupid and dangerous too, but Wayland is not one them.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 3, 2021)

vigole said:


> Most new ideas are stupid and dangerous. Wayland is one of them. Though,
> Most old ideas are stupid and dangerous too, but Wayland is not one them.



That's a fantastic thesis.  Care to elaborate amongst the two protocols?


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## a6h (Feb 3, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> Care to elaborate amongst the two protocols?


Certainly. Xorg works, Wayland doesn't.



			https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
		


It's too early, but its PRs are disturbing. Let's GNU/Linux be the guinea pig. Wait until to see the result, if it works, by all means, do the goose step.
Why Wayland exist? I don't know. Good question! There're many pages on Internet, trying to rationalise the decision. But I'm not convinced I need it.
On protocol: I'm not GUI developer, nor a regular Desktop/GUI user. Xorg just works. It's mature and has lots of docs. Wayland is unnecessary burden.

The Paradox of Progress/Choice

Montaigne (I, 42):
When King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynéas tried to make him feel the vanity of such action.

Cynéas: To what end are you going into such enterprise?
Pyrrhus: To make myself the master of Italy.
Cynéas: And so?
Pyrrhus: To get to Gaul, then Spain.
Cynéas: Then?
Pyrrhus: To conquer Africa, then ... come rest at ease.
Cynéas: But you are already there; why take more risks?

Lucretius (V, 1431):
How human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.


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## olli@ (Feb 4, 2021)

Well, the old X11 protocol is a dinosaur. 90 % of the code in the Xorg server exists for legacy reasons, inherited from typical GUI programs of the 1980s, but it’s not used at all by today’s application. And the security model is nearly non-existent: Basically every X11 client application can take control of the whole server without the user noticing.

I am convinced that X11 needs to die (painfully, if you ask me). Wayland certainly is _not_ perfect, but at least it is an improvement.

PS: By the way, most of the Wayland developers are also Xorg developers. This is good for several reasons. Most importantly, Xorg developers know the deficiencies of X11 very well. And they are familiar with both the Xorg code and the Wayland code, making it easier to create migration tools (for example, see the “XWayland” server that interfaces X11 clients to a Wayland compositor).


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## Minbari (Feb 4, 2021)

I've started in 2005 when I bought a book which had a FreeBSD 5.4 CD. Still have the book, unfortunately I lost the CD.


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## hruodr (Feb 4, 2021)

olli@ said:


> Well, the old X11 protocol is a dinosaur. 90 % of the code in the Xorg server exists for legacy reasons, inherited from typical GUI programs of the 1980s, but it’s not used at all by today’s application.


I do not see any problem there. X11 is not very big, nothing compared with the modern bloat software, it runs in old processors, in thin clients without problems. Wyland is not comparable with it, it does not implement the main goal of X11. Under this conditions, "legacy reasons" are also an advantage.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 4, 2021)

I honestly believe FreeBSD is ripe for it's own display compositor/widget toolkit. That alone with DRM in base would make FreeBSD more independent from from the wild west mess called Linux/Linuxisms. What's really needed though is some sort of X11 transition plan/strategy for legacy X11 apps.


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## olli@ (Feb 4, 2021)

hruodr said:


> I do not see any problem there. X11 is not very big, nothing compared with the modern bloat software, it runs in old processors, in thin clients without problems. Wyland is not comparable with it, it does not implement the main goal of X11. Under this conditions, "legacy reasons" are also an advantage.


I’m pretty sure that most of the Xorg developers would completely disagree with that.


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## hruodr (Feb 4, 2021)

olli@ said:


> PS: By the way, most of the Wayland developers are also Xorg developers.





olli@ said:


> I’m pretty sure that most of the Xorg developers would completely disagree with that.



Are most of the Wayland developers Xorg developers, or most of the Xorg developers Wayland developers?

And how are you so sure of what others think?


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## olli@ (Feb 4, 2021)

hruodr said:


> Are most of the Wayland developers Xorg developers, or most of the Xorg developers Wayland developers?


The former.


> And how are you so sure of what others think?


Because I’m a developer myself, and I had the “pleasure” of working with the source code of the XFree86 X11 server some time ago. And it didn’t get better since then. Apart from that, the X.org developers are well aware of the shortcomings of X11. This is a recurring topic on the xorg mailing list. One of the X.org developers collected some of the X11 problems on this wiki page at x.org (under the provocative title “X12”). The security nightmare is just one of many problems.

Basically, Wayland aims to become “X12”. By the way, some people seem to think that X.org and Wayland are competing projects, or even hostile to each other. This is not the case at all. Wayland development happens under the X.org umbrella. There were also several talks about Wayland topics at the X.org developers conference last year. It was very interesting.


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## fjdlr (Feb 4, 2021)

Minbari said:


> I've started in 2005 when I bought a book which had a FreeBSD 5.4 CD. Still have the book, unfortunately I lost the CD.
> View attachment 9113


Maybe see here  https://archive.org/details/freebsd-cdroms?&sort=-downloads&page=2


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## hruodr (Feb 4, 2021)

olli@ said:


> Basically, Wayland aims to become “X12”.


The wiki you quoted contradicts it. Guess why.


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## olli@ (Feb 4, 2021)

hruodr said:


> The wiki you quoted contradicts it. Guess why.


No, Wayland aims to fix many of those problems that are enumerated on that page. Of course it cannot fix all of them.
Most probably, “X12” will never exist, so my remark was meant in the figurative sense.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

X12 needs to surely exist one day. As it stands, Linux / UNIX are vastly inferior to Microsoft's RDP at remote UI and nothing else seems to be in development to solve that.

From the wiki:


> Maintain Network Transparency​
> The future will be more interconnected and network-oriented, not less. Network transparency makes things easier for users and can't be considered an 'optional extra'.


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## olli@ (Feb 4, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> X12 needs to surely exist one day. As it stands, Linux / UNIX are vastly inferior to Microsoft's RDP and nothing else seems to be in development to solve that.


Well, at least Wayland supports RDP natively.


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## hruodr (Feb 4, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> As it stands, Linux / UNIX are vastly inferior to Microsoft's RDP and nothing else seems to be in development to solve that.


In the quoted wiki stays:



> What is Good about X11​
> Network transparency. Network transparency rocks! Run a program on a remote system and interact with it on your local terminal; write a program and not *need* to care whether it's going to be run on a full workstation or a dumb terminal. Some may say this is unimportant, but when one looks at the development of Windows and the evolution of RDP, it starts to look a lot more like X in terms of its features.


​


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

olli@ said:


> Well, at least Wayland supports RDP natively.


No it doesn't. It sends a raster image of the entire desktop across! XD

Hopefully Microsoft will come and save us all. Show us how to do network transparency "right" haha.

hruodr Yes, it is fairly embarrassing but a long time ago, Microsoft (actually Citrix in partnership with) took our X11 concept and kept with it, improving it, securing it. They did this by showing restraint and keeping the GUI system correct. Unfortunately the same restraint was not demonstrated by the Gtk or Gnome communities who went straight to GPU rendering for the tacky childish effects. We are now very far behind. All these hundreds of broken Wayland compositors are going to put us further behind.


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## hruodr (Feb 4, 2021)

And as far as I know, the following runs with X11, although I never tested it:









						Virtual Network Computing - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## sidetone (Feb 4, 2021)

I used FreeBSD as a desktop since around 2007. I switched to Linux and back a few times. Finally, when I got FreeBSD set up the way I wanted, I stuck with FreeBSD.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

hruodr said:


> And as far as I know, the following runs with X11, although I never tested it:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


VNC is basically the fallback. It sends across an entire raster of the desktop (compresses, etc). It is very slow and simply not feasible for large resolutions. However, sometimes it is all we have left.

VNC on Windows is a little more primitive because it doesn't support sessions unlike our Xvnc servers. However I am fairly sure Wayland compositors will break that too.
VNC is very unmaintained on Windows because they don't need it, they have something *much* better (RDP). On Linux / BSD, the best we have is tigervnc (in ports). It is slightly faster at compression so just about usable on a wired LAN (forget about wifi or over internet though!).

We also have Xrdp. But just like Wayland, this form of RDP is not native, and really just sends a complete raster across, not taking advantage of true network transparency. I believe it also uses VNC underneath to obtain the initial raster. Very inefficient.

SSH is absolutely great though. For small windows using sane toolkits, X11 forwarding via SSH beats the pants of most other things (other than RDP single window mode).


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## Beastie7 (Feb 4, 2021)

Wait a minute. So is RDP just an improved implementation of X11 Network Transparency or are they two different things? Are there any whitepapers on that one can study?


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## shkhln (Feb 4, 2021)

I'm genuinely dissapointed in a yet another round of "network transparency" trolling. Windows has no network transparency whatsoever. (This is the term coined _specifically_ for X11 and nothing else is following the same model.) RDP fundamentally is a raster-based protocol, you won't be able to use it from your Unix desktop if it were instantiating Win32 / GDI primitives.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

shkhln said:


> RDP fundamentally is a raster-based protocol, you won't be able to use it from your Unix desktop if it were instantiating Win32 / GDI primitives.


So I suppose the question is that why don't we develop something similar in technology to those Win32 / GDI primitives. Why are we faffing around with large breaking changes in Wayland and still not actually getting something worthwhile? Is there really no use-case for a decent remote desktop system these days?

RDP has a concept of a Window and the GDI primitives so isn't raster based. So if it isn't network transparent, and it doesn't seem to be just raster-based.. What would you call it?


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## hruodr (Feb 4, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> Is there really no use-case for a decent remote desktop system these days?


I think Windows needs it, because it is GUI oriented. For me it is enough to do ssh to a remote machine and get a shell.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

hruodr said:


> I think Windows needs it, because it is GUI oriented. For me it is enough to do ssh to a remote machine and get a shell.


Yes, that could well be true. Perhaps one day if the next generation of GUI-only guys comes in, then we might see an actual replacement to X11.


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## shkhln (Feb 4, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> So I suppose the question is that why don't we develop something similar in technology to those Win32 / GDI primitives. Why are we faffing around with large breaking changes in Wayland and still not actually getting something worthwhile?


I'd be interested in a solution with native awareness of text and, say, svg images (if only to see how it performs), but that is difficult to pull off in Linux world of multiple infighting UI toolkits. There is some overlap with accessibility needs, so corresponding APIs might be worth looking into.



kpedersen said:


> Is there really no use-case for a decent remote desktop system these days?


Do you have any? I mean something that is not handled by a web UI (those can be very efficient if done right) or an H.265 stream of entire desktop?



kpedersen said:


> RDP has a concept of a Window and the GDI primitives so isn't raster based. So if it isn't network transparent, and it doesn't seem to be just raster-based.. What would you call it?


That would be raster + batched (as opposed to RPC) vector graphics.


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## Beastie7 (Feb 4, 2021)

This is a very interesting watch. It looks like networking is a constraint built into the system itself with it's own 2D drawing primitives. It's from the 90s so I don't think compositing was factored in, but it seems that it can be extended in the server. He compared this to X11 as well. I think this is a much better design IMO.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

shkhln said:


> I'd be interested in a solution with native awareness of text and, say, svg images (if only to see how it performs), but that is difficult to pull off in Linux world of multiple infighting UI toolkits. There is some overlap with accessibility needs, so corresponding APIs might be worth looking into.


This is the direction I feel we should be going in. Unfortunately we are going the other way. Awareness of text would be very handy so translation overlays can utilize it rather than scraping the screen.



shkhln said:


> Do you have any? I mean something that is not handled by a web UI (those can be very efficient if done right) or an H.265 stream of entire desktop?


My uses mainly resolve around using / debugging UI tools in remote VMs or machines with bespoke hardware attached (again remotely from a lab). Not having the VM rasterising the image itself is a nice bonus with X11. There is no web UI available because we aren't really a web company. A H.265 stream would add some fair stress to the VM but also at native resolution, it will be extremely frustrating to actually do any work.



shkhln said:


> That would be raster + batched (as opposed to RPC) vector graphics.



And you wouldn't say that the server telling the client to draw a line or fill a rectangle is RPC or network aware?
For example drawing a polyline.

https://github.com/rdesktop/rdesktop/blob/master/xwin.c#L4084

A VNC client doesn't have functions like this. It makes the client more complex but it results in a better system because a small instruction can be sent rather than a raster of the approximate rectangle containing it.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

Beastie7 said:


> It looks like networking is a constraint built into the system itself with it's own 2D drawing primitives.


It was called NeWS and it was quite cool technology. However X11 won out to it. Partly because X11 was faster but also more companies supported X11 with commercial / motif software.

Since it actually cares about network transmission, I suppose I would rate this as more useful than what 99% of Wayland-ish compositors are going to provide. I also really like the fact that NeWS used PostScript, I think that could have been really well leveraged (in an alternate universe of course .


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## shkhln (Feb 4, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> And you wouldn't say that the server telling the client to draw a line or fill a rectangle is RPC or network aware?
> For example drawing a polyline.
> 
> https://github.com/rdesktop/rdesktop/blob/master/xwin.c#L4084


You know what I'm talking about, X11 application would invoke XDrawLine directly in a UI loop and wait for the result, then it would send another draw command and so on. Meanwhile there is no direct correspondence between this RDP polyline command and GDI functions Windows application invoke. Notice it doesn't have any return value.


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## kpedersen (Feb 4, 2021)

shkhln said:


> You know what I'm talking about, X11 application would invoke XDrawLine directly in a UI loop and wait for the result, then it would send another draw command and so on. Meanwhile there is no direct correspondence between this RDP polyline command and GDI functions Windows application invoke. Notice it doesn't have any return value.


Well yeah, this chattiness is what makes X11 much slower than the RDP approach. Is this not exactly the thing that a successor to X11 would be solving?

Same with OpenGL graphics streaming. If you, i.e run a glGenBuffers command, it would be fairly slow to wait for the result to come back across the network. Instead the server and the client will need to have some better way of synchronising the id of that buffer (perhaps educated guessing such as TOTAL+1) so that messages mostly flow one way. X11 doesn't quite do this. A modern replacement would need to.


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## Mjölnir (Feb 4, 2021)

Wasn't that _DisplayPostScript_ of _NeXT_ designed to solve that issue?  Send only drawing primitives instead of raster images over the network?


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## Beastie7 (Feb 5, 2021)

To my understanding NeXT and SUN did two different things with PostScript. Steve Jobs wanted to take PostScript, and add more 2D drawing functionality to it that'll interface with other C programs; like a display server or an object oriented application framework. James Gosling (at SUN) extended the PostScript language itself to where you can write an entire GUI (albiet with no widgets at the time), on top of a networked windowing system. DPS is more rigid, where NeWS is more flexible, and does more by default. I see these design approaches reflected in launchd vs SMF as well. Kind of tells you about their business model in the workstation market.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Feb 5, 2021)

My old chatm8ates used to be able to crash my Win98 browser at will, I'd reboot and they would tell me what kind of anti-virus I was using. I'd pull the modem plug, reformat, and if I went to chat I'd be doing it again.

I looked through a long list of Linux LIVE CD's and used a few for a while but it just wasn't what I wanted. I tried FreeBSD but the installer looked beyond my skillset, and was. I'd have been lost at the terminal if I did get it installed but Ma Bell was something I remembered and that's what I wanted to use.

Then I found this thing you will not, called PC-BSD and I became a beta tester at v.73. That got me to the desktop, but what was under the hood was what counted not shiny KDE desktops and the .pbi push button installer reminded me of a Windows .exe.

I wanted to use ports and work from the terminal, so I taught myself to use ports. For some reason I didn't think the handbook applied, but my google-fu was strong and so was my desire to learn FreeBSD.

They asked my I didn't keep to the flock, but I was the black sheep and baw baw not in my name. That was Weixiong. I asked some embrassingly ignorant questions like where do I find portsnap in the port directory. Nobody baaathered to tell me it was a command so on I struggled, learning bit by bit through trial and lots of errors. Simple things like setting your email alias up took me forever to figure out.

In 2012 I finally fled that feckless flock forever for Freedom and FreeBSD proper and became Trihexagonal. I used a Tutorial somebody else wrote and remember the thrill that came with the sense of accomplishment building my own desktop for the first time gave me.

I still had a long way to go but the only question I remember ever asking here was a problem I had with a text browser because I had included IPv6 when building it and that messed things up somehow. I still hadn't figured but my alias, but 7 years had passed since I'd seen my old chat m8tes but they never lost interest in me.

They have stood by me all those years and watched me in silence. Like real family, the only thing missing was a photo album. Weren't you surprised when you came to visit me and I wasn't some teen troll living in his moms basement? Online they had been my superiors. Now we were on more even ground and Demons were watching when I wasn't and accidents happened

I was more than they planned on and seems there was more to the words I spoke than they thought. What a solemn ride home that must have been for what began as a fun roadtrip to exorcize an inkydinky Incubus. I was growing exponentially and I owed it all to them. 

I don't go to chat much anymore unless summoned. Chat was my medium and where I was most powerful and could speak in real time and the games I played chaos as I saw fit to cause. In my down time I would practice impressions and tell tall tales to entertain nice people.  Sooner or later a would be tough guy come along, if they picked on people weaker than them I showed them how it felt.

Pedophiles who posed as priests were playthings of pox. I would bait them in and switch to another persona later to take the fun out of it for them. When I tired of the class of people there I made myself known to one of my m8tes who knew me well. It was not glad to see you. It was as he feared...

Now I had learned FreeBSD and funny things like crashing my browser were a thing of the past. I kept it entertaining for them when I felt like it and did something to show how much I cared. All good stories have truth to them, but where does fiction leave off and reality come in. Now I was Father to my own Demon and rule along side her Mother in a Kingdom or my own.

And I owe it all to my old m8tes. If not for them I never would have gotten where I am today.  I'm getting all sentimental...

_bête noire_


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## isseeder96 (Feb 9, 2021)

vermaden said:


> I started in 2005 with FreeBSD 5.4 ...


Was it a better experience on a desktop than say, Linux at the time?


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 9, 2021)

isseeder96 I started at the same time he did. It was the same. Don't know why it would be different.


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## vermaden (Feb 9, 2021)

isseeder96 said:


> Was it a better experience on a desktop than say, Linux at the time?


For my needs - yes.

I got 30-60 days of uptime with FreeBSD with all running nicely. When I moved to Ubuntu I needed to reboot every day because of sound issues for example.

A lot about that I already described here:








						My FreeBSD Story
					

As Roman Zolotarev asked if I would write an entry for his Tell Your BSD Story page I could not refuse. That page was available at the URL but seems that Roman abandoned the bsdjobs.com domain unfo…




					vermaden.wordpress.com
				




From what I recall you would get instant reboot/panic when you would remove USB pendrive without first unmounting it.

That was probably the most 'un-desktop' like thing back then on FreeBSD.

Sound was VERY SOLID - as always was - on FreeBSD.

I had a lot sound related issues on Linux back then (Gentoo/Ubuntu/Slackware/...).

I would say that FreeBSD desktop was a lot better in 2013 when ZFS in FreeBSD was mature and tools that I started in 2012 as* beadm* and *automount* were already stable and kicking.

Regards.


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## DeliciousD (Feb 22, 2021)

I bought the FreeBSD 3.2 CD-ROMS from Walnut Creek in 1999 I believe, after taking an alternative OS personality test on C|NET. I installed it on my massive brand new 8.4GB disk installed in an old 486DX2 desktop. Good times.


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## rootbert (Feb 22, 2021)

I switched from Linux to FreeBSD 5.0 because gphoto2 was only working on FreeBSD with my camera back then... however, I switched back to Linux and came back to almost exclusive FreeBSD on my desktop + notebook with 10.0. 

Had some issues with nvidia drivers here and there and with the recent xfce4 update, but all in all I am a happy FreeBSD desktop user and use it for my job (python dev, sysadmin/cloud stuff, secaudits for ~90% linux environments) as well as for my personal stuff (manage/edit photos, edit personal videos, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web, do some office stuff). I may dual-boot twice a year into my Linux system to enjoy some gaming via steam (hope I can try the linuxulator+steam soon), and I use a really old notebook maybe twice a month to boot Linux exclusively for using MS Teams (also hopes on linuxulator+chrome).


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## eternal_noob (Feb 22, 2021)

I started to use FreeBSD a year ago. I was a long time Debian user for more than 20 years but i want to abandon it and use FreeBSD instead because of _systemd _[1] and the attitude of its developers.

PS: I know about Devuan, but that's not Debian either.

[1] https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html


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## rootbert (Feb 22, 2021)

freebsd_noob said:


> I started to use FreeBSD a year ago. I was a long time Debian user for more than 20 years but i want to abandon it and use FreeBSD instead because of _systemd_ and the attitude of its developers.
> 
> PS: I know about Devuan, but that's not Debian either.


same here, systemd was really the top on the ice. I have had many problems on servers with that bastard and still have. And somehow there was a point I really went mad, and installed a FreeBSD system within a day on my notebook: I was ready to do my work on the console as I have on my FreeBSD servers for years, just to get rid of the systemd madness on my desktop. However, it turned out that getting xorg and a nice desktop system to work on FreeBSD was not as hard as I have remembered from the 5.x days so I was really pleased to have a fully working desktop running within two hours or so.


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## hitest (Feb 22, 2021)

I started using FreeBSD at version 5.x; I honestly don't remember the exact release.  It's amazing to see FreeBSD today.


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## zirias@ (Feb 22, 2021)

mark_j said:


> It [X] was […] really only used so you could have multiple xterms open […]


Which is still the main reason for X, right? Well, nowadays plus a web browser


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