Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:35:40 +0200 From: Lorenzo Cogotti <miciamail@hotmail.it> To: FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP510B16745B704C714268E2D5950@phx.gbl>
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Hi, I was wondering about the possibility of FreeBSD to provide an official supported graphical environment. Currently FreeBSD doesn't provide any standard desktop environment, this means that, in a way much similar to Linux, a developer cannot know in advance which GUI will be available on the system. This leads to another problem, again much similar to Linux, tools are usually provided in a text based fashion only, because that's the only sure and reliable way a tool can work in a relatively dependency free and independent way. As another effect, many utilities and graphical tools are provided for a toolkit, but not for another, needlessly duplicating efforts and applications, achieving barely half the result. Though, in a different way than Linux, FreeBSD doesn't get much support from developers in this regard, mainly because development focuses over Linux rather than FreeBSD, which remains known only as a good and reliable server platform, many technologies remain relatively unknown and doesn't get attention from developers, like devd vs udev, and other solutions that FreeBSD provides since a very long time. The idea would be choosing a default desktop environment and providing it as the official supported way to develop GUI applications on FreeBSD, thus tools provided on FreeBSD would be able to get official GUIs and supported graphical tools in a standard and non-redundant fashion, like a GUI for tools like pkgng, geli(8), gpart(8). This choice would also be motivated by the fact that often technologies move toward Linux support, like GNOME3, dbus and consolekit, without taking into account BSD. In this regard CDE[1] is could be an interesting choice, since it was a diffuse and reliable UNIX environment, and it is lightweight, relatively Linux-like dependencies free solution, which could be updated to today standards and extended to support FreeBSD features. CDE was just recently released with open source license[2] and some effort is being made to support FreeBSD. Of course CDE isn't the only possibility, the idea is "desktop environment agnostic", also I don't mean that FreeBSD shouldn't work with other environments, which could still be installed and used as long as they support the platform properly. I don't mean forcing a graphical environment over installed FreeBSD systems either, which could be unwanted for server installations. [1] http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/ [2] https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/978aff3dc9c7d009423a3d7fd0624d12f9df0734/tree/cde/COPYING?format=raw I see this as an interesting opportunity to let FreeBSD gain more visibility in the desktop field, would this idea be useful and worth implementing? Thanks, -- Lorenzo Cogotti
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