[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

Fri May 10 01:12:57 UTC 2013

For what it's worth,  I only need Xorg, xpdf and xterm to take care of my
graphics needs. Everything that doesn't involve coding happens on linux,
mac and winxp.

As long as a distro can support Xorg, it is viable for me. So whatever you
guys do, please don't remove the basic graphics capability!
On May 9, 2013 7:20 PM, "Garrett D'Amore" <garrett.damore at dey-sys.com>
wrote:

>
> On May 9, 2013, at 4:00 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us>
> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 9 May 2013, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> >>
> >> Upshot, *today* anyone who thinks there is a commercial future in
> illumos on the desktop is probably smoking something.  There are a few
> people who would be willing to pay for it, but it needs more than a few
> dozen people willing to pay a couple hundred dollars (more often
> substantially less) to make this a viable and interesting (economically)
> venture.
> >
> > There is little "commercial future" in the desktop for Linux
> distributions as well yet almost all of them have a graphical desktop.
>
> Admittedly true.  And yet, most of them *started* on the desktop.  Linux's
> roots are in the desktop.  Most of those distros took off because they had
> a groundswell of support from developer users who wanted it on the desktop
> -- they didn't have servers, and options like VMware simply didn't exist at
> the time.  I'd argue that this is largely an artifact of history. I would
> be entirely *unsurprised* if distro vendors like RedHat and Oracle simply
> *ditched* their desktop support at some point in the future -- its clear to
> me at least that folks aren't running those distros on the desktop.
>
> In fact, I can't think of *anyone* who's paying for a desktop OS that
> doesn't come from either Apple or Microsoft.
>
> > Availability of a graphical desktop is seen as a requirement for common
> acceptance.
>
> Historically true, but I seriously doubt it now.  SmartOS is the counter
> example from this community.  I think there are others.  For example,
> OpenBSD was highly popular for a long time for its security emphasis, but I
> don't know *anyone* who ran it on a desktop.
>
> The widespread availability of virtualization like VMware, VirtualBox, and
> Parallels means that there is little need to take over the user's desktop
> to provide a reasonable environment.  Most people these days develop using
> SSH, etc.  The folks I know who use Linux would, apart from a few
> extremists, not care whether the desktop ran Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris, as
> long as it Just Worked and provided a familiar UNIX-like backend.  (I
> contend that these principles have lead strongly to the uptake of MacOS in
> the developer community…. I use an Apple laptop for my own environment,
> even though I wouldn't *dream* of using MacOS in a server capacity.)  For
> me, Terminal.app and ssh is along with VMware gives me everything I need
> for doing cool things with illumos on my desktop.  I explicitly *disable*
> the graphical login on illumos. :-)
>
> >  Much/most of the graphical desktop development taking place for Linux
> does not seem to be done by the companies which popularly peddle it (e.g.
> Canonical has been more of a desktop packager except for its useless Unity).
>
> Only partly true (Qt is the counter example).  But yes, a lot of the
> desktop development in Gnome and company is done by community members who
> are passionate about this. And guess what -- almost all those guys are
> Linux "bigots".  There's a huge trend in those spaces to adopt technologies
> that are Linux-specific, to the point of near active hostility towards
> other FOSS.  That creates a huge barrier for leveraging their efforts.  Do
> we have the kind of volunteerism here to take up a duplicate effort?  And
> why just duplicate?  If we have *that* kind of interest and volunteerism,
> I'd recommend actually doing something *cooler* and better.   Of course,
> that flies in the face of legacy compatibility….
>
>
> >
> > The argument about "no commerical future" is becoming worn out and tired
> since that (commercial purpose) is not why OpenIndiana/Illmos users want to
> log into a graphical desktop.
>
> Worn out and tired it may be, and *yet* people complain about the lack of
> leadership and progress.  I don't know about you, but I have to pay for
> housing, groceries, and gasoline (among other things).  So I have to work
> at things that pay the bills.  I am lucky enough that this maps well to
> things that are also interesting to me.  Maybe its unfortunate that folks
> aren't finding ways to make a living at this, so that a developer community
> will spring up around it.  But more constructive than whinging about it
> will be to find ways to either a) make a commercially viable case for it so
> people can get paid to work on it, or b) lead a volunteer effort to make
> this work.
>
> The problem with "b" is that its a very large, and often thankless, job.
>  People spend more time complaining about broken things on the desktop,
> than they do actually helping fix things.  Individual leaders get
> exhausted, and move on.  This is a recurring theme in this community --
> Nexenta desktop, StormOS, AuroraUX, OI, etc.
>
> So, it comes, for me at least, back to "a".  Figure out a way to make a
> commercially viable story so that you keep a small group of developers
> paid.  Right now, I don't know of any such story, and when I bring this up,
> the responses like yours Bob, amount to nothing more than putting your head
> in the sand.
>
> Put another way -- even if there were a million illumos users wanting a
> graphical desktop (there aren't), it wouldn't matter *unless* amongst them
> there were either the people with the talent and inclination to create and
> maintain the graphical desktop, or people willing to pay enough money to
> *employ* someone to do it.  (Alternatively, a business case showing that
> desktop use is sufficiently important to non-desktop commercial use to
> justify funding that work.)  To date, none of these have converged.
>
> Frankly, none of this is surprising.  Our desktop technology is inferior
> in substantial ways to pretty much *every* OS (excepting perhaps NetBSD and
> OpenBSD.)
>
>         - Garrett
>
>
>
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