PC-BSD's new Lumina desktop is advancing fast

in bsd on 2014-08-28 10:50 (#2R4Y)

Earlier this year the folks at PC-BSD announced they would be developing a new desktop environment by the name of Lumina. The official PC-BSD blog <recently posted a progress update on the Lumina desktop that shows they are making huge progress. There are screen shots and a list of updated features.

PC-BSD is a popular desktop-oriented BSD flavor that is really just FreeBSD with extras.
Lumina is a new light weight window manager built on Fluxbox using the Qt toolkit. The development is spearheaded by Ken Moore of the PC-BSD project.

There's lots more about Lumina at their Lumina FAQ. Most important of all is the question "Why a new desktop environment?" Their answer is related to the fact that because the other desktops are built first on Linux they must be ported, which is taking more and more time and energy; furthermore, many desktops now depend on Linux-specific functionality that makes the port almost impossible.

The Lumina desktop will also provide BSD-specific features through its file manager, like full ZFS snapshot restore capability.

[Ed. note: sneak preview, but I was planning on doing this one for Distro Friday tomorrow. Stay tuned.]

Linux-specific dependencies ? (Score: 1)

by seriously@pipedot.org on 2014-08-28 12:24 (#2R5N)

many desktops now depend on Linux-specific functionality that makes the port almost impossible.

As a Linux user considering a move to *BSD someday, apart from Gnome dependency on systemd, are there other Linux-specific functionalities that I should be aware of ?

Besides, rumor has it that OpenBSD would start development of an api-compatible systemd replacement to solve that specific issue, but I haven't seen any news on that topic yet.

Re: Linux-specific dependencies ? (Score: 4, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-28 14:42 (#2R75)

There's a somewhat good discussion of it here: https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=45658 and here: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-May/100411.html

There's also the fact that the BSDs are traditionally server, not desktop OSes, and Gnome3 is a very unfriendly, heavyweight desktop with lots of packages and dependencies and high resource demands from the hardware. That makes it unsuitable for servers.

That said, it's apparently running on OpenBSD, which is somewhat of a minor miracle.

Re: Linux-specific dependencies ? (Score: 1)

by seriously@pipedot.org on 2014-08-28 18:57 (#2RBA)

There's also the fact that the BSDs are traditionally server, not desktop OSes

I'm aware of that but I thought that PC-BSD was precisely the more desktop-oriented version of FreeBSD. My usual workflow involves vim/cmake/C/bash/git/Matlab and I usually stay in userspace (so no low-level kernel dev). I also have some personnal LAMP projects. All of which I thought as mostly OS agnostic things.

What compromises would I have to make if I were to use PC-BSD or FreeBSD with another DE* for such a R&D desktop ? (i.e. as opposed to a personal computer, for which I'd probably stick to Linux for now)

*certainly not Gnome 3, mind you ... ;-)

Re: Linux-specific dependencies ? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-28 19:56 (#2RCE)

Off-hand, I'm not sure you'd have to make any compromises at all, other than learning where BSDs put things. On BSD, /bin is for system stuff, and everything you install after initial OS installation goes into /usr/local. So if you build an Apache server, it's in /usr/local/bin and the configs are in /usr/local/etc/apache/ . Meanwhile, sendmail, being part of the initial system, winds up in /bin and /etc/mail/.One interesting question is using cmake and gcc now that FreeBSD has moved to Clang/LLVM. But I'd think those packages are in the ports, so you install them and then work away. According to https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?&t=10076 Matlab is available in the ports collection too. Doesn't look like you'd be affected at all, and there are dozens of WMs to choose from, from Ratpoison all the way up.

Re: Linux-specific dependencies ? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-08-29 20:52 (#2RVT)

You may want to see if your GCC based projects compile under Clang. I've noticed it often seems to output smaller binaries for the same code, and I tend to find its error output to be less cryptic.

Snapshots (Score: 1)

by computermachine@pipedot.org on 2014-08-28 20:26 (#2RCS)

The Lumina desktop will also provide BSD-specific features through its file manager, like full ZFS snapshot restore capability.

That's a good feature. I am running OpenZFS under Linux, but manage my snapshots through the terminal.