Does Desktop have a future on BSD?

ralphbsz said:
The only future of using a desktop on FreeBSD (matter-of-fact, on any OS other than the big 4, in which I include Linux and ChromeOS) is for hobbyists and evangelists. And if those people want to use it, great. Just don't think for a moment that they can speak for others.
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This is, at best, misleading. Forget about "evangelists" for a moment, as this implies your operating system is your religion ... I've seen that with some Linux and Windows users in the wild and keep wondering what's driving those people, never seen such behavior exposed by a FreeBSD user so far...

So, leaving this out, does your statement imply that anything not for corporate business is hobbyism? In that case, it makes sense. But the same would hold for Linux as well. I'd say this has nothing to do with any (technical) properties of the operating systems and a lot more with marketing and support contracts etc.

For a deployment at home, a FreeBSD-desktop is as good as any other desktop, and for me personally, it has the advantage I only have to manage one operating system (as my server is FreeBSD already).
 
Zirias said:
This is, at best, misleading. Forget about "evangelists" for a moment, as this implies your operating system is your religion ... I've seen that with some Linux and Windows users in the wild and keep wondering what's driving those people, never seen such behavior exposed by a FreeBSD user so far...

For a deployment at home, a FreeBSD-desktop is as good as any other desktop, and for me personally, it has the advantage I only have to manage one operating system (as my server is FreeBSD already).
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There's no future for systems that are apparently stillborn for a graphical desktop environment. DragonFly BSD is said by system experts to be a very good system, far superior to FreeBSD. Religion or the supremacist complex has no relation to the subject it posts.
 
My personal view on this matter is that the "desktop" has no future on any platform.

Not entirely happy about it but I strongly suspect that the casual user will move to a tablet / web browser environment. Companies that produce commercial software (Skype, Netflix, Adobe, etc) will not even provide a desktop client that needs porting. It will all be web (via something like WebAssembly). Game streaming hitting off will be the largest catalyst for this.

In order for FreeBSD to survive we only really need two things. We need drivers to keep the damn thing working on current hardware and a strong browser that keeps up with these web trends. The rest of the stuff (X11, Gnome, Qt) really doesn't matter any more than what desktop wallpaper you prefer.

FreeBSD's focus on servers may even be what keeps it alive once the idea of a desktop fades from computing... or at least until history repeats and the desktop rises to power again in ~80 years.

The driver support worries me. For that we either need users to be loud and convince hardware manufacturers that our number is large enough to make it worthwhile. Or the OpenBSD approach is to attract mainly developers and to do it themselves. FreeBSD currently seems to be trying to do a mix of both.
 
It looks like many people on this planet, thus including this forum, consider the word 'success' to be a synonym for 'domination'.
This is a fundamentally destructive belief: nature shows us life can only be 'successful' through cooperation.
Just have a look at a patch of wild plants and you'll understand: without all the others sharing the same place, none of them could thrive.
I wish FreeBSD will never be 'successful' if that meant we wouldn't have any other option.
Meanwhile, FreeBSD not dominating the desktop OS market doesn't mean it can't be a good option for some of us.
 
20-100-2fe said:
It looks like many people on this planet, thus including this forum, consider the word 'success' to be a synonym for 'domination'.
This is a fundamentally destructive belief: nature shows us life can only be 'successful' through cooperation.
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100% agreed, the "closed mind" is useless
I think Kpedersen is right,and is a
sad true for me,in a future everything will move in a cloud enviroment.
the only thing important will be a web browser.
it won't matter the OS...
Hopefully the desktop environment survives and there are options like there are today
such as choosing Qt or Gtk (also Gtk3 or Gtk2).
In 15 years there will be faster hardware
like today are SSD disk,and wont notice that Qt is slow beside Gtk2
for example.
but I'want the freedom of choose and the possibility of tweak everything like I'do in FreeBSD
 
teo said:
There's no future for systems that are apparently stillborn for a graphical desktop environment. DragonFly BSD is said by system experts to be a very good system, far superior to FreeBSD. Religion or the supremacist complex has no relation to the subject it posts.
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"apparently" and "system experts". Do you have anything to say? Or are these hollow phrases all that is to expect here?
 
wolffnx said:
In 15 years there will be faster hardware
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One of the worst things about it is that consumer hardware in 15 years might not be faster. The only thing we might be able to buy is weak / low powered thin clients that simply interact with servers in the cloud.

Yes, server hardware will be many magnitudes faster (especially if quantum computing can be used effectively). However I don't believe users or developers will be able to buy this stuff directly. This stuff will only be relevant for "cloud companies" who have probably signed an NDA.

My recommendation is to horde working maintainable hardware now for when this happens. Worst case scenario is that you have a cool collection of retro hardware ;)
 
kpedersen said:
My recommendation is to horde working maintainable hardware now for when this happens. Worst case scenario is that you have a cool collection of retro hardware ;)
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yes,a good example of that is there nothing can beat a program writen in C in speed,but today almost anyone dont think of that because wont note the diference
(but I'do)
 
pyret said:
FreeBSD desktop has no future.
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I think the biggest misunderstanding here is the word "future". I believe that nobody here is a perfect oracle. In other words our ability to predict the long-term outcomes of Complex Adaptive Systems is extremely limited in time. Personally I believe that when I have used FreeBSD on my desktop 12 years, I can easily use it the next 12 years. Also, MATE on this machine feels much better than KDE twelve years ago. There has clearly been a progress...

ZFS is another good thing. I have configured both of my FreeBSD desktop machines (in fact desktop and laptop) with ZFS boot. ZFS alone is a good reason to use FreeBSD. Cloned my old FreeBSD desktop just taking out one drive from ZFS mirror, installed it in the new machine and later rebuilt the mirror with new drive.

And the most important thing is that it is all built from source and have the copy of that source on my hard drive. That very fact might be the most important point in talking about long term future. In case of cataclysmic events in Human History the Open Source has more chance to survive...
 
I was hesitant whether to write here or start new topic. I think about GUI software with FreeBSD version (X.org/Gnome, not web). In many cases the user hardware may not have all drivers to run native FreeBSD. How practical is to use desktop GUI from X terminal (e.g. on Raspberry Pi, Linux or even Windows)? FreeBSD server can be in the same local network or even in VM on the same hardware. I guess if server is at longer distance the latency can be too high and make remote work uncomfortable. In other words, the idea is to have GUI app on FreeBSD and solve driver problem with remote access if necessary.
 
kpedersen said:
My personal view on this matter is that the "desktop" has no future on any platform.

Not entirely happy about it but I strongly suspect that the casual user will move to a tablet / web browser environment. Companies that produce commercial software (Skype, Netflix, Adobe, etc) will not even provide a desktop client that needs porting. It will all be web (via something like WebAssembly). Game streaming hitting off will be the largest catalyst for this.
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That's what the terminal or CLI command line purists believed, however since many years ago tablet or mobile phone came out, the king is still the desktop environment (GUI) with Windows or Linux systems that most users prefer to keep using and will keep using.

kpedersen said:
In order for FreeBSD to survive we only really need two things. We need drivers to keep the ..... thing working on current hardware and a strong browser that keeps up with these web trends. The rest of the stuff (X11, Gnome, Qt) really doesn't matter any more than what desktop wallpaper you prefer.

FreeBSD's focus on servers may even be what keeps it alive once the idea of a desktop fades from computing...
Click to expand...

FreeBSD with server-only marketing will not survive as it has been proven over the past 25 years and is about to disappear.

kpedersen said:
The driver support worries me. For that we either need users to be loud and convince hardware manufacturers that our number is large enough to make it worthwhile. Or the OpenBSD approach is to attract mainly developers and to do it themselves. FreeBSD currently seems to be trying to do a mix of both.
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But what users? There are only a few users who consume what little marketing FreeBSD has and with that insignificant share in the world the system will end up dying. FreeBSD must be extended to the desktop environment in a standardized way so that the number of users in the world will be increase and it will survive so that the hardware manufacturers or drivers will continue to supply it, because they will want it for the share of users in the world market.
 
Zirias said:
So, leaving this out, does your statement imply that anything not for corporate business is hobbyism?
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I'm sorry, I didn't express myself clearly. What I mean by hobbyists is: people who enjoy building and configuring and tinkering with their computer, rather than just using it. People who want a functioning computer just go to the store and buy one, or do the minimum amount of work to get it to function. Hobbyists are the ones who turn the setup of the computer into their hobby.

By the way, I am in that category for certain things. For example, I have a set of programs that monitor and control my water system at home, and I put a lot of work into tinkering with it. That is completely unnecessary, but fun for me.
kpedersen said:
My personal view on this matter is that the "desktop" has no future on any platform.

Not entirely happy about it but I strongly suspect that the casual user will move to a tablet / web browser environment. Companies that produce commercial software (Skype, Netflix, Adobe, etc) will not even provide a desktop client that needs porting. ...
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There is a lot of truth to that. Even desktop stuff (documents / spreadsheets / presentations) is moving to the web; you can now run both Microsoft Office (including Visio) and Google documents purely from a web browser. As Zoom has demonstrated, you can also do video-conferencing from a web browser. I have software engineer / scientist friends that use Chromebooks and do absolutely everything from them, including data analysis and coding. The only "program" that runs on their machine is a web browser. This is probably the trend things are moving in.
 
teo said:
That's what the terminal or CLI command line purists believed, however since many years ago tablet or mobile phone came out, the king is still the desktop environment (GUI) with Windows or Linux systems that most users prefer to keep using and will keep using.
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I don't think the figures will support that. Most casual users I know do everything on their phone (not even a tablet).

Google's Web Office has a vastly larger user share than LibreOffice even though it has been around a fraction of the time. It is actually impressive how the uptake of web based programs has been.

Terminal or CLI purists left desktops years ago and unfortunately took many of their software expertise with them. The desktop reached its pinnacle years ago and has been regressing ever since.

Again, the main holdouts are gamers. If the industry can crack that one (I give it less than 15 years), the desktop is gone. Only some "retro" enthusiasts will remain. The future is CLI or Web Browsers. Luckily FreeBSD supports both just as well as any other OS.

And this is from someone who hates the "consumer cloud" and would like to see it fail in any way possible.

Edit: Forgot developers. In 5 years you are going to see Microsoft do a massive push of an online IDE (based on VSCode and their plugin infrastructure). It will be incredibly successful leveraging the popularity of GitHub, Teams and even LinkedIn. The vast majority of developers flock to it. The only holdouts are the CLI guys. Without desktop developers, you have nothing.
 
I’d say that any O/S that has a fundamental program for supporting end users and providing an intuitive GUI with support for gaming hardware would have a good standing in the desktop world.
 
We can do two things for the support of tiers software.
First try to pass a message like «compatibility with FreeBSD is cool»
Second, adding a merge request in a lot of ported qoftware to add the freebsd compatibility and th installation instruction.
I saw on mac OS X macport, darwin ports and now homebrew.
Homebrew is popular because it is cool and documented in a lot of how to install in Mac OS X.
 
kpedersen said:
Google's Web Office has a vastly larger user share than LibreOffice even though it has been around a fraction of the time. It is actually impressive how the uptake of web based programs has been.
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The world is waking up every time and realizing what it uses, I don't think it will continue using the trojan horse and will prefer hardware as free software.
kpedersen said:
If the industry can crack that one (I give it less than 15 years), the desktop is gone. Only some "retro" enthusiasts will remain. The future is CLI or Web Browsers. Luckily FreeBSD supports both just as well as any other OS.
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It has been over 10 years since devices (tablets and mobile phones) achieved commercial success worldwide, however they have, not been able to replace 100% to the desktop graphic environment systems to date. The king of mass usage is still the graphical desktop environment consumed by Windows and Linux. Web browsers need a GUI because the masses of the world's population use it and do not use CLI.

kpedersen said:
Edit: Forgot developers. In 5 years you are going to see Microsoft do a massive push of an online IDE (based on VSCode and their plugin infrastructure). It will be incredibly successful leveraging the popularity of GitHub, Teams and even LinkedIn. The vast majority of developers flock to it. The only holdouts are the CLI guys. Without desktop developers, you have nothing.
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So the massive use of systems on computers for graphical desktop environment is for long years more and will not decline.
 
The good part of «web application» is the dependency over WM... So a light WM as DWM work very well.
(Same for games, but the driver/performance part is more important).
So, if .doc needs Google doc in future and code needs Visual Studio Code, it can be handle with any OS on any hardware.
And if tablet becomes the main format, you will by a tablet and install FreeBSD on it, as you do on desktop and server...
The situation described here is not a pain for FreeBSD as desktop/laptop/tablet system.

[Edit]
I forgot to mention that after years where git == github, self hosted gitlab increase deeply where I work. So the full web app hosted by big company is not a clear future.
 
I have a cheap laptop/ultrabook i bought it some years ago it costed me 100 Euros it has aluminum body slim desing, 4gb of ram, i installed a M2 SSD drive and wifi works fine with freebsd i just want to configure touchpad with synaptics. It seems that runs freebsd very fine and on youtube i believe it is doing it even better than linux , so i can say freebsd has a future as a desktop.
It just needs more software.
 
zoom.us conference application,viber,an easy markdown editor (typora,hoorapad), advanced development text editor ( i'm not sure maybe freebsd has that) , some more professional video editors could be nice to have but at least to have gpu acceleration working in kdenlive/shotcut would be very good. Having Cuda and/or opencl working on blender would be cool too.
Also porting widevine to freebsd would be something that it would useful to watch netflix,curiositystream etc.. or having a torrent video streaming application like webtorrent or popcorntime would be a must to have.
Well ... after all i don't think i would miss something.
I have made some freebsd installations and i get used to it , i only need to make the decision and have the psychological strength to go forward finding new problems i have never encountered yet.
 
Could BSDs have any future on the desktop? I hope that if one day BSDs take up a considerable part on the desktop, they will maintain their nature without becoming Windows, giving everything that is served to the user with everything preconfigured and with default bloatware, so BSD is still a family of systems operations that necessarily require at least basic computer skills to be able to use them too if this makes the situation of the BSD on the desktop does not improve because I do not know about you, but I prefer a thousand times that people who use some BSD have such basic knowledge in computing before someone presents their ideas to make it the next Windows and I'm not a computer expert, I'm still studying and I'm not 'bragging about anything because I'm not an expert or less professional, but I never like to listen to those people talk about certain basic notions about how a program works, what operating system and what functions it performs What is the GPU, CPU, RAM, HDD, SSD and other electronic devices and how they work as if it were something that only the experts knew. Again, before you tell me something, I repeat, I am not an expert or a professional, but I am not a novice either, so I do not pretend to presume anything or pretend that someone interprets me with an aggressive or presumptuous tone. I'm just saying that there are certain basic notions that many exaggerate and that because they have no idea about that many times they stop using certain operating systems, finally yes,

PD: When I say BSD I am referring to a family of operating systems and not to an operating system only, in addition I only mean by BSD the only ones that in my opinion truly differ from each other and can be considered independent and not a modification of the other as they are Most of BSD, I mean specifically, solely and exclusively /NetBSD/ FreeBSD/OpenBSD. Well these are the only ones that interest me, the rest are like the GNU / Linux distribution forks, the same but configured differently, for example Ubuntu which is nothing more than a Debian modification.
PD 2: NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD if they are my favorite operating systems and I do not have them installed because a new laptop has only 128GB of storage although later I will stop using it when I have a desktop PC and yes, I also think that it was necessary to clarify it.
 
I use OpenBSD as a desktop every day. (And MacOS and Windows and Linux Mint).

Not sure what the question/point is?

Modern GUIs and web browsers are huge and packed with functionality and eye candy - so they need lots of resources. I imagine the future they'll have even more functionality and even more eye candy and they'll need even more resources.
 
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