Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so.

From my experience of "old" computers, workstations, and then "PCs as Workstations", Windows won the desktop because the UNIX camp could never check their egos at the door and get their act together on a windowing system and graphics architecture. And while it was brilliant that you could do the "heavy lifting" on a server and do the display part on a less powerful machine, that architecture should have been taken out behind the barn and shot the moment 2D and 3D acceleration hit the framebuffer cards. Instead we have the crap that I have to put up with, which is a wonderfully compact and powerful system (A NUC5i7YRH) with a graphics architecture that is not supported at all on FreeBSD and has pretty egregious bugs on Linux, and runs beautifully on Windows 10.

For the conversation at hand though, the Linux graphics pipeline teams are much better at getting things working than the FreeBSD team, even though FreeBSD is much more "friendly" to non-open drivers.

I would love to have a nice, integrated, workstation type experience with a UNIX operating system but that music died when SGI and Sun through in the towel and tried to retreat to the machine room.

> the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so.

The funny thing is that there's a reason for that: up until recently, the focus of FreeBSD has been on being a server OS. There's a push recently on improving the graphics situation, but it's only relatively recent, and is mainly focussed on getting integrated graphics on more modern hardware working. There are also some efforts to expand the driver compatibility layer so that Linux drivers can be run as kernel modules with minimal change.

Moreover, FreeBSD types aren't quite so fixated on making a "FreeBSD desktop" as the Linux community is. Sure, there are desktop spins like PC-BSD, but the project as a whole has never really had desktops as a focus.

FreeBSD as a project is pragmatic, and tries to focus effort on where the greatest benefit lies.

Of course, there's the larger issue of Linux being insular, with a tendency to reinvent the wheel (epoll vs. kevent/kqueue being a nice example) rather than looking at what the state of the art is elsewhere and adopting that. You just have to look at containerisation: Solaris and FreeBSD have long had this in the form of Zones and Jails[1], but containerisation on Linux is largely an independent effort that didn't look to learn lessons from those efforts or adopt them.

[1] And I remember containerisation being mocked when hypervisors and VMs were all the rage. How things change...

IIRC FreeBSD was making some decent progress on the workstation experience before Apple released OSX. Once that happened, a lot of the people working on that switched over and the efforts kind of died down for a while.

I haven't used FreeBSD on a desktop for years, but I've been told it's getting a lot better recently.

All very true. Part of the reason why the effort flagged was that suddenly there were these high-quality machines with a BSD userland around. Un/fortunately (depending on your perspective), Apple haven't put a tonne of effort into keeping that side of things as up to date as they might, so improving the desktop experience on FreeBSD again.

Up until 7.0 came out, the desktop experience was pretty decent, and things like audio and video (anecdote ahead) worked out of the box better than Linux. After that, things started to slip in comparison.

The work put into PC-BSD has helped with the out-of-the-box experience, assuming your have the right hardware, but it's good to see more effort being put into improving the general driver situation. I certainly wouldn't be at all against ditching Ubuntu and switching back to FreeBSD as my desktop OS.

The containerisation approach on Linux isn't because of insularity or NIH - it's because the Linux kernel development process does not accept large, far-reaching "big bang" code drops. Instead, changes that have wide impact across the core kernel are expected to be made in a series of smaller incremental improvements, each of which is more limited in impact and more easily reviewed.

Such as systemd? :-)

systemd isn't part of the kernel at all.

Yet.

(Does kdbus count?)

Given that they seem to have given up on kdbus, and is instead developing something called bus1 that appears they are not even planning to submit for inclusion, i find myself thinking that the systemd devs are these days working on enveloping the kernel.

Meaning that you no longer use kernel syscalls, but instead program with systemd in mind and then systemd talks to the kernel as it sees fit.

Just observe their actions regarding session tracking, where they are basically ignoring all data from the kernel about sessions.

Why would borrowing the APIs enabling existing containerisation approaches have lead to large, far-reaching big bang code drops?

The base problem there is drivers. Specifically that we have something like 3 suppliers of desktop GPUs.

One refuse outright to supply information that allows a proper open driver to be developed.

Another have just started providing this information in recent years, and there is still delays between the latest hardware hitting the market and the proper information reaching relevant hands.

The third only recently started producing hardware, and said hardware is only bundled with other products from same supplier. Never mind that it in general performs worse than the other two offerings.

There used to be another, one that was supposedly well supported by open drivers. But that one long since left the consumer market, focusing instead on multi-display business setups etc.

so effectively you are complaining about how a group of people, forced to reverse engineer and often working in their spare time, can't match the market gorilla that gets direct support from third party suppliers.

I personally would accept a huge hit in performance for a fully libre system (software and hardware) and would be willing to pay more than the average desktop/laptop price for it. I know I'm not alone but I wonder if the market is big enough for a company to start producing hardware products on that core principle.

Dunno. But i could have sworn i had read about a libre GPU design out there.

Perhaps that is the core complaint. But at the end of the day support for those cards is what we need for our everyday computing. I don't think anyone is trying to undermine the work that Linux/BSD communities are putting forth in attempt to supply end users with software support for uncooperative hardware vendors. But again, they don't have control over that situation. So, in the mean time it shouldn't come as a surprise people are looking elsewhere to satisfy their computing requirements.

Thing is that when one aim the complaint in the wrong place, effort goes to waste fixing the wrong problem (or a non-existent problem).

I had hoped that the FreeBSD folks would put together a locally rendered (composited?) architecture that had a test suite and clear cut API such that vendors could create their own proprietary driver and load it there.

I get that it is impossible for the free software and hardware community to design a GPU. I also get that people who do design them have no interest at all in leaving any money on the table by sharing so much of the design that their "secret sauce" gets stolen (or they get hit with patent abuses).

Because it is genetically impossible for the Linux community to tolerate, much less endorse or encourage any sort of proprietary advantage, I do not expect that Linux will ever be a functional desktop environment of the level and quality of a Mac or Windows environment. FreeBSD could be that environment but they have to design for it. So far it hasn't been a priority for them.

Why not try Apple? Mac OS X is an awesome UNIX that makes for great desktop use. Of course there are all the hipsters and idiots that use it, but put that aside and give it a solid try.

If Apple were to release MacOS for non-Apple hardware I would upgrade to that in a heartbeat. If the Ubuntu 'shell' for the Windows kernel works out I might switch to that as well.

Why not just do a hackintosh?

I had tried it 6years ago. Every OS update used to break the machine. Even USB ports had issues.

I don't know. That kind of architecture can still be useful and I personally use it when running some graphical apps inside of a docker container

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