Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

Garrett Cooper yanegomi at gmail.com
Mon Sep 17 20:22:47 UTC 2012


On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Lorenzo Cogotti <miciamail at hotmail.it> wrote:
> 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."

...

To cut things short because this is really turning into a bikeshed: go
talk to the folks at PCBSD. They are interested in using providing a
graphically oriented version of FreeBSD and have multiple DEs
distributed with their custom FreeBSD distribution. See if you can
work with them to achieve your goals and then upstream the result to
the upstream maintainers, or create a subproject that can be used in
ports and/or elsewhere, then work with the PCBSD/FreeBSD devs to
integrate your work into ports.

I'm also sure that if you have something that hasn't been developed
yet that's useful you will get more than a handful of Linux-oriented
devs who will be interested in assisting you in making the
application/applet available in more than one OS.

Thanks,
-Garrett

PS It's not that I don't care about the effort (I run straight FreeBSD
with fluxbox/X11 on my workstation at $work and my Netbook), but
unless people put their money where their mouth is, this will just
turn into another "it would be nice to have FreeBSD do X-Y-Z" threads
that have not actually resulted in anything actually changing :(...


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