Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 08:44:19 +0700 From: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@nsu.ru> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, michael@rancid.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market Message-ID: <20140403014419.GA45830@regency.nsu.ru> In-Reply-To: <201404012240.s31MeIe4073267@hergotha.csail.mit.edu> References: <CAF6rxgkeBozvfV-L0%2BrFZ6fWRn0=Gi3BNq1kPL=-HTq0TD6MkQ@mail.gmail.com> <082a01cf4db9$240d3e90$6c27bbb0$@FreeBSD.org> <201404012240.s31MeIe4073267@hergotha.csail.mit.edu>
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On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 06:40:18PM -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote: > Hmmm. I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the > desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD. It's still my > primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which > drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few There are a few alternatives to Lightroom available in Ports Collection, you might want to give them a try one day. > remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash). That's easy: Flash sites should be avoided. Most of them are using this technology for showing stupid ads anyway, not for something useful. I still recall a friend of mine actually *loved* that his iPhone does not support Flash: it essentially enabled (ad|spam)-free Web browsing (alas, those fuckers had caught up since then). > But let's be clear that different people have different requirements > for a "desktop". My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm, > XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE, > gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and > Firefox for "promiscuous-mode browsing"). [...] > > Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK. But > let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good > now (and has actually gotten substantially better). Application availability does not, unfortunately, round up some perfect desktop. I fear that Linux-centric development of hardware drivers, X.org and all that shit is getting more and more divergent from FreeBSD, and soon enough we'll get the situation I haven't seen for some 15 years: we are again far behind on modern HW support. Power-saving techniques, most notably working sleep-resume and competitive batter life are also our weak points at the moment. I'd like to replace my old laptop (which runs 8.4-STABLE almost perfectly), but how far can I go with, say, recent MacBook Pro? ./danfe
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