# Cleaning up / stripping GNOME 2 and tailoring it to FreeBSD



## kpedersen (Aug 11, 2014)

Hey all,

This problem isn't really specific to FreeBSD but I am getting a little tired of the multitude of broken or novelty desktop environments around these days in open source operating systems. I am honestly finding myself starting to recommend Mac OS X to the students that I teach OpenGL to just to have something a little bit usable on their desktops.

So finally, I have committed some future time to actually cleaning up the existing GNOME 2 desktop and stripping away the parts that do not work and tailoring it 100% to FreeBSD. I have just created a project repo on GitHub and it would be great if anyone here would come on board and even forward the word. I feel that even though I am just cleaning the desktop up, it is still going to take quite a bit of manpower to polish but it is certainly going to be worth it to get a FreeBSD specific DE without implementing one from scratch.

You can read the project's aims here: https://github.com/osen/imp

The project is aiming to be monolithic (which CDE has shown to actually be quite easy to maintain in the long run) and if one port at a time is brought into the repo from the ports collection and the patches committed, it shouldnt be so hard. The goals obviously differ slightly from Mate because FreeBSD is going to be the first class citizen in this project and as such it should prove to be very maintainable for years to come without needing to play catchup. The other main difference is that all files will be localized to /usr/local/imp and $HOME/.imp.

The gnome@ team probably have their hands full endlessly wrangling with GNOME 3 but I will be contacting them too once I get something working.

Cheers,

Karsten


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## NewGuy (Aug 11, 2014)

*Re: Cleaning up / stripping Gnome 2 and tailoring it to Free*

Not to discourage you, but why not join the MATE team and try to improve their cross-platform support? They are a fairly small group that has been very successful and, I suspect, if you offered to help maintain the FreeBSD port, they would be willing to considersupport FreeBSD as a first class OS. Quite often I get the impression more open source projects would happily support FreeBSD if the project had FreeBSD members.


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## kpedersen (Aug 11, 2014)

*Re: Cleaning up / stripping GNOME 2 and tailoring it to Free*

It did cross my mind but Mate is starting to look into supporting GTK3 and Wayland. Making the desktop work well on FreeBSD is infinitely more important than this kind of stuff.

Plus I will reiterate, the point of this project is to keep it maintainable, simple and correct, not cutting edge / novel features. Think LibreSSL rather than OpenSSL. FreeBSD has had >10 years to get GNOME 2 working fully and it never happened. Working with upstream on a Linux desktop environment is obviously not working.


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