Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 16:33:49 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: From Slashdot... Message-ID: <79876.917829229@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:17:51 -0400." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9901311508520.374-100000@thelab.hub.org>
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> ...is FreeBSD destined to be a "server" environment only, with anyone > wanting to do any serious graphics or multimedia needing to fall onto the > Linux bandwagon? Yes. Interest in the desktop has been so marginal as to make it no longer worth even thinking about and I think it's time to realize that the server is our bread and butter. Everyone talks about how nice desktop support would be but nobody DOES anything and, as a result, every initiative to support the desktop more seriously in FreeBSD has been a dead loss. The desktop contest went down without so much as a single decent entry, XiG sold about 3 copies of CDE for FreeBSD when they made a play for the (non-existent) FreeBSD desktop market (and don't tell me this was just anti-CDE attitudes in action since they sold thousands of copies for Linux) and the attempt to bring 3DFX support to FreeBSD has been so long in coming that I'm no longer even waiting for it, etc. If I wanted a Unix machine purely for the desktop today, I'd install Linux. It has all the multimedia frobs, support for exotic 3D gfx and sound cards, desktop applications, you name it. FreeBSD has a pool of about 50 users who feel about as strongly about the desktop, it seems, and that's just not enough to reach critical mass, especially when those users are not also software developers who can actually write drivers and improve existing support. Do I sound bitter about this? Perhaps just a bit. For whatever reason, the multimedia developers have not seen fit to actually develop multimedia support in FreeBSD and, as a result, we merely have a lot of users milling around asking when their hardware is going to work. That's not a winning situation, and it's my hope that perhaps DVD support will be the one thing we can do which allows us to catch at least the trailing edge of the wave since it's also the one thing that people who use X for little more than popping up lots of xterms (as most FreeBSD users, including myself, seem to do in a server-centric environment) will want. Movies have universal appeal. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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