Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 22:46:45 -0700 From: Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org, freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Leaving the Desktop Market Message-ID: <CAF6rxgkeBozvfV-L0%2BrFZ6fWRn0=Gi3BNq1kPL=-HTq0TD6MkQ@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled "Story of a Laptop User" and "Story of a Desktop User". For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it=E2=80=99s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Wind= ows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it=E2=80=99s tha= t we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: "but you won't be able to use your graphics card"? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be "year of the Linux desktop" and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler
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