Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 23:30:18 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Roadmap and Weak Spots - A regular SysAdmin perspective Message-ID: <14722.24026.444072.638766@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <bulk.39192.20000728163349@hub.freebsd.org> References: <bulk.39192.20000728163349@hub.freebsd.org>
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> From: "Simara" <simara@mail.cyberlink.com.pe> > (Please no more Anti-Microsoft, or nothing besides the OS, my questions were > somewhat direct to BSD not other OS or Company, you are trying to make > people migrate for what the OS is, not by blaming and throwing stones to > other companies) Ok, except to point out that microsoft has at most 1 feature that's actually innovative; all the things you named were done first by someone else. Some of them are good things that it would be nice if FreeBSD had, but I don't see it happening. > 1.Officially is there a roadmap? Where? If there is one, I'd be surprised. Remember, there is no central authority dictating what is going to happen, as there is with the Linux Kernel and MS. Some of the core members have papers up that describe what *they* are planning (like Kirk's soft updates & snapshots paper, which are nice, innovative features for you), but that just applies to one person. > 2. GUI besides X11 on the works? (I really like X11, just asking) X11 is *not* a GUI. It's a collection of mechanisms you can use to build a GUI. As a result, you can get GUIs that look like pretty much whatever you want. There are window managers that look like Windows (95 & 98, and I think I saw a 3.x one as well), the Mac, and the Amiga (at the very least). Of course, there 54 different ports x11-wm directory, most of which should be window managers or tools that can be used to extend window managers. Personally, I run a version of lwm (it's in x11-wm) with local extensions for CORBA support, and 9menu (also in x11-wm) for root menus. If you can't tell, I'm a minimalist when it comes to GUIs. If that's not good enough, there *are* other windowing systems around for Unix. I think Sun wound up giving away their PostScript-based server; NextStep (if you can find the sources) ran on Unix, and there was at least one light-weight windowing system around as well. And of course, you're always encourage to write one of your own. But the bottom line is that, for better or for worse, X won the open systems GUI war. It's what people expect to find on a Unix system, which is what FreeBSD is. Providing a system that didn't have X would pretty much kill FreeBSD. Making something else the default would violate POLA. If you want other things, you can get them. > 3. Talking about the auth protocols and communications add-ons just to point > what is new in the OS, are there any long term projects that have something > really new on the works? Well, now that OpenSSH is bundled into the base system, it's a lot more capable than what MS is providing. Configuration is harder for the things Windows can do at all, but that's SOP. KAME integration is ongoing so we're getting IPv6. But for the most part, these aren't the kind of things that are done in the core OS. They're added as ports, where you can already find things like openh323, which is a video conferencing system. But this is the wrong list for things like that. To find out more about such things, you should ask on the lists that are appropriate for the kinds of things you're interested in. <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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