Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Lorenzo Cogotti]

Il 17/09/2012 20:32, Garrett Cooper ha scritto:
> *gathers breath for really tangential/OT rant*
>
> <joking>
> Sounds like we have someone volunteering to write a chapter in the
> handbook and do some X11 development to make Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE,
> Fluxbox, [...], or etc work better on FreeBSD!
> </joking>
If I proposed it, is because I'm willing to offer my help implementing
my idea if it gets attention :-)
>
> To be succinct: this is not OSX/Windows. True Unix and Unix clones can
> be decoupled from a desktop environment enough that forcing everyone
> to have one choice for desktop user experience doesn't make sense, and
> the fact that there isn't a common GUI development toolkit (GTK, QT,
> etc) encourages fragmentation of effort further (I think it's called
> the Bazaar model of development :P).
As I tried to make clear, I *don't want* to limit user's freedom in any
way, nor getting away UNIX philosophy in any way from FreeBSD, nor
trying to remove servers or other desktop environments solutions in any way.
Solaris and other UNIces had CDE as their default environment, this was
not preventing a perfectly written toolkit that used X server to run
there, it wasn't preventing users from tearing away the GUI part and
using it without it.
My only objective is estabilishing a standard, just saying "you want to
make a GUI application for FreeBSD? You are asking yourself what desktop
environment will work for sure on FreeBSD? There you have it, Blah DE
works just well and is perfectly documented."

> [...] Even the Linux kernel//GNU/Linux OS
> doesn't have a single adopted DE as its flagship DE.
Do we really have to look at Linux searching for good standards? They
had OSS for audio, then replaced it with ALSA, now they're using
pulseaudio as the default sound server while pretending that ALSA is
still the standard (which is half-backward compatible with OSS anyway),
while they're still deciding what's better for their init system... ah,
they're also trying to replace X with Wayland :-)


>  With all of the
> choices I listed above (and more), getting everyone to agree on
> working with one DE is like herding cats, in part because
> end-users/developers have different requirements, opinions, work
> styles, etc.
I don't mean that everyone should use exactly that, just ensuring a
supported and well documented desktop environment to work with, nothing
more, one might always decide to use another one (and to create FreeBSD
utilities for another DE).

> It makes more sense to provide hooks into several DEs (like Linux,
> PCBSD, etc has done) to accomplish various tasks in a GUI-ish manner
> (setting up networking, wireless, etc) and upstream those changes if
> and when one has the chance to do so. 
But that's not going to eliminate the tremendous work to support every
desktop environment well, nor will give developers a chance to provide
official GUIs themselves, without delegating other developers and
providing 4 different GUIs for every desktop environment.

> Finally, one should then become
> a devoted "testing resource"/"advocate" FreeBSD OS integration in the
> future if one has interest in continuing to use said DE on FreeBSD.
Yes, that's probably true
> Thanks,
> -Garrett

Basically my point of view is:

- You're using FreeBSD as a server?
Fine, nothing will change, just leave the GUI alone.

- You're using FreeBSD with a minimal graphical environment, no desktop,
no nothing?
Nice, you can just keep using that, with the traditional text based
utilities to manage your system, which are always provided since FreeBSD
works just great as a server and UNIX separates GUI from your system.

- You're using FreeBSD with your favourite desktop environment and you
don't like the official FreeBSD environment?
Nice, nothing will change, as long as the developers will do a good job
supporting FreeBSD, using UNIX standard programming and that environment
works with X, you can keep using it.

- You want to use FreeBSD official environment?
Good, you'll get official utilities for FreeBSD and you are ensured a
certain amount of support and stability from your system, since that's
the official environment.

- You are a developer wanting to build some FreeBSD desktop utilities?
Unless you want to specifically target your utility to a desktop
environment, you have documentation, guidelines and support for the
official desktop environment. You are also able to interact with the
rest of the desktop (for example creating a GUI configuration editor, a
taskbar icon or simply stream a sound). You can also communicate with
other official desktop utilities, since (official utilities) are all
targeted for this environment, you can, for example, create a
partitioning tool and other utilities can communicate with it nicely
(because it is well documented and easy to find out).

So I can't see how bad this is, it simply looks as a nice to have
standard to me, exactly like POSIX, even if UNIX has the bazaar
philosophy, you still offer POSIX compatibility and X server as sane
defaults.

Thanks,

-- 
Lorenzo Cogotti