Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Lars Engels]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:00:21AM -0500, Zhihao Yuan wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Lorenzo Cogotti <miciamail at hotmail.it> wrote:
> > 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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> 
> I definitely agree with this. Sun has a book, "UNIX Essentials
> featuring the Solaris...", and GUI takes a big part in the book. A
> default GUI is essential to a modern UNIX. FreeBSD can no longer
> regard GUI as a third-party bonus.

If you want a default GUI, install PC-BSD. It provides several graphical
management tools for FreeBSD.
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