FreeBSD on the desktop

[doug]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2020, Aryeh Friedman wrote:

> There are a lot of people who want to make FreeBSD a OS that is usable on
> the desktop by normal everyday non-technical end-users (aka a "retail OS")
> and the very same people (or a sizable overlap at least) also are the ones

That is a not the goal (I believe) and certainly not my reason for wanting
it to be easier to run FreeBSD as a desktop. I want to attract or at least
not discourage people who want to become kernel developers, port
maintainers, etc. I want (as a FreeBSD advocate) to attract these people in
middle school. I believe not to do this will eventually lead to FreeBSD
only being used by Netflix or the like and it's downhill from there (IMO).
For those who disagree you are, as far as I can tell, are in good company
(ie. most of the core team). There is some indication that this is not far
fetched. E.g., pair.com and petitecloud.org that address their products to
Linux, not any of the BSDs.

There are a couple of projects that offer this. I do not know enough to know if 
there is a "best" one of these or not. The people I think we need to attract 
would be more likely to say, I do not use Ubuntu or FreeBSD-desktopx, I got 
stable running on my {fill-in-the-blank} and it rocks. But they likely would use 
an "easy-entry" thing as a first step.

These are the ones that will eventually totally write a working wifi port
because eventually they will want to do some serious stuff and all of the
workarounds will be just annoying. Just my thoughts YMMV.