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Date:      Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:32:00 +0100
From:      Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
Message-ID:  <20081213143200.GA5026@lpthe.jussieu.fr>

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Glyn Millington wrote:

> > But, we can _gently_ (it hasn't always been so gentle) teach
> > newbies that the list is meant for something higher than just
> > repeatedly ragging on why isn't FreeBSD more like MS or RHEL
> > or whatever.
> 
> Or even "why isn't FreeBSD more like FreeBSD used to be back in the
> day?"

As you suggest, first, discussions about the direction FreeBSD should go
are eminently FreeBSD related, and second, i think the passeists in the
community, broadly speaking the sysadmins, not the programmers, are
the worst enemies of FreeBSD progress. A number of obvious errors have
crept in the thread, for example that Linux is crap - it has never been
as good, and now outperforms FreeBSD in nearly everything - or that
Gnome and Kde have nothing to do with FreeBSD, when there are dedicated 
FreeBSD teams working precisely on that. The idea that an OS has to be a
server OS (translate, friendly to sysadmins) rather than a desktop OS
leads directly to irrelevance (example Solaris), while the crappiest of
the crappiest desktop OS succeeds in getting a foothold in server space,
simply because people are used to it, and don't want to complicate
their life. In general an OS gets hardware support proportional to the
number of its users, so it is criminal to advocate concentrating on a
niche use. Specifically for the question of nVidia 64 bits support, the
nVidia engineers have clearly stated their intention of developing the
driver as soon as appropriate kernel support is present, so as to be
able to dothe same thing they are doing under Linux - a very
understandable requirement. It happens that, for several years, no one
has been able or willing to provide this kernel support. This is harming
FreeBSD in an obvious way, but personally i could not care less, i use
Intel video card.





-- 

Michel TALON




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