Leaving the Desktop Market
Sean Bruno
seanbru at yahoo-inc.com
Tue Apr 1 12:07:42 UTC 2014
On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 22:46 -0700, Eitan Adler wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some of you may have seen my posts entitled "Story of a Laptop User"
> and "Story of a Desktop User". For those of you who did not, it can
> be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a
> desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD
> can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default
> and often doesn't work as well as we would expect.
>
> The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past:
>
> Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows
> can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it
> two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that
> we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS
> can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run
> for 16?
>
> Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically
> change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do
> that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be
> staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get
> sound streaming to other machines working if you tried.
>
> FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't
> released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on
> FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with
> the caveat: "but you won't be able to use your graphics card"?
>
> In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera
> only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason
> for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape
> Linux anyways.
>
> That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the
> desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be "year of the Linux
> desktop" and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for
> server or embedded use.
>
> Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I
> must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the
> Linux world?
>
Why even bother? Its over, just embrace the future and be like this
happy Mac user:
http://people.freebsd.org/~sbruno/happy_desktop_user.jpg
sean
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