Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Matthias Andree]

Am 17.09.2012 17:35, schrieb Lorenzo Cogotti:
> 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.

What is the particular problem?  All major toolkits ultimately talk X11,
and most applications that I have seen will work in any desktop environment.

I for one prefer a reasonable text-tool to a half-baked playful GUI that
leaves half of the questions unanswered because the author has no faint
clue as to how to properly present a complex technical situation.

> 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.

As though someone cared.  End users could not care less, they just want
their stuff to work and get the job done.

You don't get developers just because you follow an obsolete standard.

If you want to make sure that the tools that you'd like to see not "move
toward[s] Linux support", then (a) make sure they are aware there's more
than their favourite Linux distro, (b) help them out.

Regarding Linux dependencies, there are few and far between, and most
features do not rely on particular kernel support -- and where they do,
abstracting that, or providing FreeBSD support, is far more useful than
trying to make someone follow a desktop that died a decade ago.

Popularity matters in open source.  Particularly with desktops.

-- 
Matthias Andree