Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 10:35:56 -0500 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: "Pedro F. Giffuni" <giffunip@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: GGI (was: Project Status) Message-ID: <20030205103556.B7212@papagena.rockefeller.edu> In-Reply-To: <20030205035930.45235.qmail@web13404.mail.yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Pedro F. Giffuni wrote: > As a short summary some of us want o turn FreeBSD into > a decent desktop by providing high quality graphics > support in the kernel. I don't think this is what's holding back FreeBSD (or Linux) at all. It's an old logical fallacy: Windows has graphics support in the kernel; Windows is successful; so if we have graphics support in the kernel, we'll be successful. XFree86 is doing great, and getting better and better, in my opinion. What's the problem? Speed? I have no problem playing DVDs on FreeBSD or Linux, on an 800 MHz laptop without the benefit of a hardware decoder or accelerated card. Stability? It's rock solid. Features? They're adding new features at a rapid pace -- with recent improvements in freetype and Keith Packard's recent XFT stuff, the font display is probably better than Windows or Mac, and the overall ease of configuration is getting there. With XFT2 you just need to drop a font into your ~/.fonts directory, and XFT2-aware applications can use it. I think the next XFree86 version will also have on-the-fly video mode selection. For the people who say X is bloated, slow, etc: X was around in the 1980s before Microsoft Windows, and it ran quite nicely on ridiculously slow machines. SGI became a graphics powerhouse using X. GGI looks like an interesting toy project (it's been around for a while too). No harm if interested people work for it. But FreeBSD and Linux already have all the infrastructure needed for a good desktop system: people need to work on ease-of-use issues, which is high-level software. For a decent desktop, we need to support and use the efforts of projects like KDE and GNOME, better integrate their system management capabilities with FreeBSD, maybe come up with a better default configuration of these environments as part of the install. Incidentally, one serious missing feature for desktop users, on both FreeBSD and Linux, is packet writing software for UDF file systems (CD-RW). (There are patches for linux.) Is anyone working on that for FreeBSD? What about the other BSDs? - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20030205103556.B7212>