Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 20:35:27 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: scrappy@hub.org, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: From Slashdot... Message-ID: <80474.917843727@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 01 Feb 1999 02:41:44 GMT." <199902010241.TAA17102@usr04.primenet.com>
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> The people I'm aware of who use FreeBSD as a serious desktop are > using KDE. It complies with open standards, and has the disctinct This in no way explains the failure of XiG to market CDE to the FreeBSD market whereas it had a success with the Linux market. Remember how this topic started, please understand: The issue wasn't KDE vs CDE vs GNOME vs TWM and 3 sexy icons masquerading as a desktop, the topic was commercial ISVs showing some "faith" in the FreeBSD desktop market through sales experience. When you sell 3 copies of something that sells thousands of copies elsewhere, this does not lead to faith and that was the ONLY reason I brought up CDE at all - I have zero interest in getting into a debate about its technical merits or lack thereof since that wasn't the point in the first place. > I think the desktop contest went down so badly because it was a > phenomenally uninteresting thing to hack on. I personnaly didn't > get involved because of the politics of layered software in FreeBSD; The ports collection has over 2000 items in it now. Arguing that this approach was somehow infeasible doesn't really make sense in that context given the sheer number of people who have clearly gotten their heads around the concept enough to contribute new ports/packages. > technology needed to layer software; for a desktop, this is a > System V style rc structure. It's just not worthwhile working on I don't agree that desktops fundamentally require a SysV rc structure. That's like arguing that SCO would run faster if the box it came in was a different color - a non-sequitur at best. > You might want to rehold the contest, if you can promise that the > winner's code will go on the CDROM as something other than a port, I seriously and honestly doubt that this would make the slightest difference. I know you don't agree, but I simply haven't seen any real evidence to lend weight to the above assertion. > so that is not the problem. Rather, xBSD does not have > the fbdev driver system and the next release of KGI is > not done yet. If these problems can be fixed (not by me), > all of this should work on xBSD as well. Why not by you? "If not you, who else?" :-) > FreeBSD has to be willing to integrate code that's not that interesting > to the core/committers who, probably because others migrated away, are > predominantly server weenies, not desktop weenies. Much of the code that's integrated today is not actually that interesting to the majority of core/committers, it's done because somebody asked for it (and, in the best cases, contributed it). If we only imported that which personally interested us, FreeBSD would be much smaller than it is today. I leave it to you to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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