joekiser writes:
"Antoine Jacoutot has given a status update for GNOME users of OpenBSD, including a short video. The GNOME release has been updated to 3.10.2, and auto-mounting of devices is now supported through a new helper program, toad. Now is a great time for desktop users to test the upcoming OpenBSD release. The ports tree was recently locked for stability testing ahead of the 5.5 release, meaning that recent -CURRENT builds are very close to what will be released in May. Antoine also addresses the upcoming issues non-Linux systems face with GNOME, such as the upcoming hard dependency on systemd."
[ED Note: I ran an OpenBSD router box years ago when tinkering about with an old PII with four NICs seemed worthwhile. The OS lived up to it's rep, but it never occurred to me to use it for a desktop system. Are any Soylentils using OpenBSD for a GNOME-based workstation?]
(Score: 5, Funny) by space_in_your_face on Friday February 21 2014, @04:28AM
The real question is : can you use your computer as a workstation when it's running gnome 3?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by toastedlynx on Friday February 21 2014, @04:42AM
It was my opinion that one of the major draws of OpenBSD was Gnome 3 incompatibility.
Apparently nowhere is sacred.
(Score: 1) by joekiser on Friday February 21 2014, @07:14AM
On the contrary, OpenBSD is the best place in *BSD land for Gnome compatibility. Now if its KDE you want, you'll have to go elsewhere.
The World is Yours.
Former
(Score: 1) by crutchy on Friday February 21 2014, @04:50AM
as long as gedit works, i'm good :-)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @06:13AM
A bus stops at a bus station. A train stops at a train station. Work stops...
Seems Gnome 3 would be perfect for a work station.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bobintetley on Friday February 21 2014, @06:30AM
Why is everyone so down on GNOME? Do the people bashing it actually use it or just dislike it on principle?
I posted this in a previous thread, but I'm just curious. I really like the direction the GNOME team are taking with it and I find it a much more productive desktop to work with than GNOME 2 ever was. I get that they alienated a chunk of their existing userbase by changing things so drastically and I guess the early versions were a bit fragile and featureless but that was poor release management by distros trying to adopt it before it was ready.
Do desktops really have to keep copying Windows 95 forever? There are desktop environments to suit everyone, if you don't like GNOME then fine, go with XFCE, Flux, E, KDE, whatever, but stop moaning about it. I think the GNOME guys are doing a great job.
(disclaimer, I'm not a GNOME developer and have no affiliation with them. I'm a full time free software developer and I use GNOME3 all day, every day).
(Score: 1) by No Respect on Friday February 21 2014, @07:08AM
Meh. Give me the old OS/2 Presentation Manager over any of this stuff any day. That goes for Windows XP/7/8, Gnome and KDE. Any and all versions of the latter two.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by toastedlynx on Friday February 21 2014, @07:14AM
To be honest, yes, I personally dislike GNOME on principle. To me, I cannot get behind supporting a GUI that decides to scrap everything and try again every few years.
Though I can't speak for anyone else, another possibility for people disliking GNOME 3 is the fact it's a major reason for most of the big distros making SystemD the default and in many cases only init system, taking away those plain text logs so dearly loved and generally going against philosophies users of *NIX systems love.
You have a point, though. Linux and open source land is good for it's choice. The end-user should be free to choose whatever he/she/they wish. Perhaps that's another reason people dislike GNOME 3 and the SystemD it increasingly depends on. Their existence ends up reducing choice for the rest of us since all the distros wish to be up-to-date.
This story's about OpenBSD though. In the case of OpenBSD, I can't really understand how GNOME 3 is relevant or even wanted. Your point remains valid though. What makes open source great is the freedom of choice. What also makes it great is the community's feelings can and often does change the shape and direction of projects, too.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bobintetley on Friday February 21 2014, @09:42AM
I don't feel too strongly about systemd.
I've only read a little and it seems to solve some security and other problems inherent with the old sysv init. It also seems to allow logging earlier in the boot process and uses the standard syslog, so why wouldn't it still produce text logs? Moving to declarative, config based scripts seems like (ostensibly) a good idea since all distros end up with their own libraries of bash functions to try and standardise init scripts anyway.
I'll reserve judgement on systemd until I've played with it a little and read more, but in general I think progress is to be encouraged!
You're right though, OpenBSD seems like an odd choice to use for a desktop given the distribution's niche - I'm surprised they even bother packaging X for it :)
(Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday February 22 2014, @01:23AM
To be honest, yes, I personally dislike GNOME on principle. To me, I cannot get behind supporting a GUI that decides to scrap everything and try again every few years.
Is that you, jwz? [jwz.org]
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by joekiser on Friday February 21 2014, @07:23AM
I have bashed Gnome 3 in the past, but it took about two days of actually giving it a fair shot before it became the preferred desktop on my 12" Thinkpad. Like KDE, it needs tweaking initially to get working to my tastes. I use Tweak Tool to configure things that aren't available in the default settings, like the size of the titlebar, fonts, and font DPI. I add on things like Weather, Caffeine, and the drop down Terminal emulator (accessible by pressing the key above the Tab key), as well as an add on to remove the stupid animations. Switching applications is great, and using a taskbar seems antiquated.
I can see where people using large monitors would hate it. Gnome 3 out of the box is geared towards small screens like laptops and touch-screen devices. It almost certainly requires the Windows key to be productive, which my Model M at the desktop does not have. Still, the Gnome 3 approach focused on stability and speed first, and incrementally adding new features with each release; this is in contrast to the KDE 4.0 fiasco which is still prone to crashing after all these years if you resize a panel the wrong way.
The World is Yours.
Former
(Score: 1) by kbahey on Saturday February 22 2014, @11:34PM
I have never used Gnome as my desktop. Always used KDE, and was happy with 3.5. After KDE 4.0 was released, Kubuntu's initial KDE releases (the non-LTS ones) were a complete disaster. I almost considered moving away from KDE, be it Gnome (shudder!) or XFCE. However, the next release fixed the issues, and I have been on KDE ever since.
If KDE screws up again, I am moving to XFCE or LXDE or something lightweight.
Yakuake on KDE pops up a terminal when you hit a certain hot key.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by chromas on Friday February 21 2014, @07:35AM
Bitching is fun.
A lot of people jumped ship when Gnome decided to take a ß on its users and turn the desktop environment everyone was comfortable with into something else. And it wasn't even sudden; Gnome's been slowly ßing over the last few years, telling their audience that settings are confusing and the defaults are perfect anyway.
No but you can't just roll the dice and expect something good to come out.
But they did like it. Then it became something else. Imagine if Windows or TechTV just suddenly dropped everything and just became something entirely different.
(Score: 1) by bugamn on Friday February 21 2014, @08:51AM
Is that an Eszett [wikipedia.org] representing an beta? Does this also mean that Soylent supports UTF8?
*After a preview test* No, it doesn't.
(Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday February 22 2014, @01:10AM
SN does support UTF8. However, various bits (lameness filter, preview, "Code" or "Extrans" modes) don't work or don't work well with it (yet). While I haven't tried it much myself, I've heard less reports of problems when inserting html entities than directly inserting the UTF8 character.
I'm posting this in "Plain Old Text" mode, and inserting a β here: β <--- did it work? (preview says yes)
And inserting the character itself here: β <--- and did this work? (preview says no)
(Both those, if they come through right, will be actual betas, not eszetts. The whole point of unicode is so we don't have the limitations that led to using one glyph to represent eszett and beta...)
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bobintetley on Friday February 21 2014, @09:47AM
If a userbase are comfortable with a project, then it should never change?
I'm not arguing that either way, it's a difficult question to answer. My feeling is that projects with minimal change tend to stagnate, users drift off to the new shiny (which can be both a good and a bad thing) and the project loses relevancy.
The GNOME team did keep the "classic" mode, that basically allows you to use a desktop that looks and works like GNOME2, but with GTK3 etc, however I'm not sure whether that was an option earlier on and it doesn't seemed to have appeased the folks who claim they still want GNOME2 anyway.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by efitton on Friday February 21 2014, @11:58AM
The GNOME team did not have "classic" mode for years until Mate and Cinnamon ate their lunch. My understanding is that "classic" is not fully functional or compatible compared to GNOME 2. For example, they moved the clock back to the default spot of GNOME 2 but did NOT allow users to move the clock. They missed the point with classic.
I think there is a huge difference between stagnation and wholesale changes. I also think GNOME did themselves no favors by keeping the name. They went from a proven full featured desktop to an experimental desktop but did kept the same name. Changing the direction of a project while keeping the name and expecting the same treatment, including being the default DE shipped by distributions, will certainly bring resentment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:24AM
I don't think Classic was about MATE or Cinnamon. I think it was something that Red Hat's customers demanded. Red Hat compelled Gnome to develop a Classic desktop lest they lose business.
(Score: 1) by pjbgravely on Friday February 21 2014, @10:01AM
(Score: 1) by bobintetley on Friday February 21 2014, @10:09AM
4 monitors!
You probably already know about it, but there are some GNOME3 extensions that improve multi-monitor support and allow a top panel per monitor and other things (I have a 3 monitor setup).
(Score: 2, Informative) by pjbgravely on Friday February 21 2014, @10:42AM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GeminiDomino on Friday February 21 2014, @10:48AM
Cleverly subtle, the false dichotomy was almost easy to miss. It's also completely possible to try it, realize that it's a steaming pile, and move to something else, like you say later.
The GNOME project has a long history of "our way or the highway" and combined that, in GNOME 3, with change for the sake of change and the snake oil that is "UX." The abomination that resulted spent a week getting in my way before I decided to wipe it and install Xubuntu (and the GNOME crap is creeping into that one now, too. Might be time to switch to Mint)
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Friday February 21 2014, @12:08PM
I was a Gnome guy all the way until Gnome 3. I tried, I really did. I gave it an honest 2 weeks, and never even started to feel comfortable in it. Then I tried KDE4 for a couple week, which I actually liked better, but was pretty heavy for some of the older hardware I was running. I've settled on XFCE4 at this point. It's lightweight, customizable enough and it doesn't get in the way.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by everdred on Friday February 21 2014, @12:47PM
>Why is everyone so down on GNOME? Do the people bashing it actually use it or just dislike it on principle?
I used Gnome 3 as my primary desktop for a couple of months last summer before switching back to XFCE in abject frustration. The main problem is that Gnome 3 lacks basic functionality, requiring third-party extensions to recreate basic desktop functionality.
I'm not talking about KDE-style 'every-feature-ever' completeness. I really really liked Gnome 2, which should signal that I'm not an old-school Gnome hater. I watch the progress of the MATE project with hopeful optimism.
I spent countless hours wrangling these problematic extensions as they conflicted with one another, very often crashing and causing Gnome to disable all of them at once, leaving me to try to figure out which ones I had enabled right before the crash. (Here's my extension list from when I last used Gnome 3: http://imgur.com/a/U44Hb [imgur.com]. If you're wondering why it's split into two screenshots, Gnome does not let the user resize that particular window.)
A secondary problem with the extension system reminds me of one of the most annoying things about Firefox: updating the program causes incompatibilities with extensions. Hobbyist extension developers are always a step behind the development of the main environment, and because of the 'core should be small; everything should be a extension' philosophy, functionality can go missing for days or weeks after a major update.
The final straw for me was a day I needed to shut my laptop lid while on battery power and not have the system suspend. Of course there's an extension. Of course it doesn't work anymore. Of course there's a bug open. Of course the Gnome developers removed the functionality that used to allow this to work.
The word we're looking for here is "clusterfuck."
We don't take no shit from a machine.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by evilviper on Friday February 21 2014, @08:06AM
I don't see any reason to use OpenBSD as a workstation, instead of FreeBSD. Many years ago I did, and it was a valuable learning experience, but occasionally quite painful. Some of that pain is gone, but so, too is some of the simplicity and other benefits I admired, and few people any longer need that kind of learning tool...
OpenBSD's advantage is in startup scripts simpler than FreeBSD or Slackware. You really have everything in /etc/rc, and configure everything in rc.conf... Great for a noob to learn, and nice if you're massively messing around with startup. But really, FreeBSD is only slightly worse. FreeBSD also has some ACPI support for power management that OpnBSD lacks, drivers for FAR more hardware, a considerably more extensive collection of ports/packages, and vastly more configurability with ports.
These days, OpenBSD has a pretty good collection of ports, but they're not configurable, every package gets built with ALL options and dependencies, pulling in obscene numbers of unrelated packages to be built first, like ALL OF GNOME when you want a calculator...
I used-to love how plug-and-play it was, just autodetecting and loading drivers for any hardware it knew of (which wasn't that much) years before Linux got things like Kudzu that took the black art out of it, and when FreeBSD required manually configuring which modules to load.
But the world has changed... There is less hardware variety, other platforms have done better at identification and automatically enabling devices, and it always seems like OpenBSD hasn't added a new sound card driver in a decade... OpenBSD was never ahead, but they seem to be lagging even further behind as their user-base shrinks, and their funds dry up.
Some of the most useful experience I specifically gleaned from OpenBSD was figuring out how to compile software on crufty old Unices, using out-of-date versions of GCC, and similar. This helps tremendously when your company wants to standardize on one software package to provide a given service, but your crufty old legacy Unix boxes aren't officially supported, and the code won't compile due to missing typedefs, fast ints, conflicting headers all around the place, and more.
I still slightly prefer OpenBSD's boot manager... Very simple command-line tool, which lets you enable the serial console right there (blindly typing-in the command if needed), enabling verbose boot debug info, and RECONFIGURING the kernel, to change driver parameters, or disabling trying to detect a certain driver, all of which makes getting OpenBSD booted on a finicky machine with weird bugs substantially easier than the more polished yet less functional systems out there. You might not think you want/need that in a desktop OS, but years ago, my Laptop wouldn't boot with anything else, and my non-x86 workstations were never fully functional using any other open source OS.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @08:28AM
That beautiful piece of Unix simplicity has been in FreeBSD for decades and is still there to this day. Without it, FreeBSD is worth a lot less. All default configs in /etc/rc.conf makes life so simple.
I have never understood this need to improve the speed of the boot process by a few milliseconds. How often do people boot their systems? In my case, once every few years.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @10:46AM
FreeBSD has /etc/rc.d and /usr/local/etc/rc.d, where packages can install scripts to start, stop, and control daemons. You use rc.conf to define which ones should be started (and what other arguments they're given). On OpenBSD you just have /etc/rc.local, which is a shell script. This means that there's no way for a package uninstall to remove an rc entry, so you end up having to bracket everything in tests to see if the daemon that you're trying to start exists, which means that turning on a service in OpenBSD involves copying a few lines of shell script into rc.local. In FreeBSD, you just set the {package name}_enable variable to YES and it runs. When it's uninstalled, that line is dead code, but it's just setting a variable, so it's safe (it just slows things down slightly).
While speeding up the boot is nice, the most important reason for replacing init systems is that you want something that can be managed at scale. Adding and removing files is easy, as is running a command that (atomically) updates some structured format. Modifying a text file, especially one that contains code written in a Turing-complete language (e.g. POSIX shell), is not something that scales well when you're trying to manage thousands of machines.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:20PM
Running services from packages is not something you do on a regular OpenBSD system. Anything I care about can be set as a variable in rc.conf.local. Of course the article is about Gnome, so you are going to get everything and its grandmother running as an insidious service. Good luck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @09:15PM
Your information is out of date. OpenBSD also has scripts in /etc/rc.d, and enabling, say, saned is just a matter of setting "pkg_scripts=saned" in /etc/rc.conf.local. rc.d scripts first appeared in OpenBSD about three years ago.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:30AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @04:35PM
> FreeBSD also has some ACPI support for power management that OpnBSD lacks
OpenBSD is generally considered to have better ACPI support than FreeBSD, especially on laptops (including suspend/resume and hibernate). Also, OpenBSD's KMS support is further along, and other BSDs tend to pull in the fixes from OpenBSD first.
(Score: 1) by evilviper on Friday February 21 2014, @10:20PM
You got that completely, totally, and utterly BACKWARDS and wrong.
OpenBSD didn't get ACPI working until 2011:1 00802212025 [undeadly.org]
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20
FreeBSD's ACPI support dates back to at least 2001:o pos=0&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+5.0-RELEASE&arch=d efault&format=html [freebsd.org]
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=acpi&apr
Maybe so, but not by much, and IMHO KMS is a misfeature, anyhow, that I'd prefer to be without, even on Linux.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:37PM
If you had read the post you replied to, you'd know he didn't mention temporal precedence, just better quality. You could have asked him for some evidence to back his claims.
Paying so little attention it's no wonder you favor a slow, outdated and insecure system.
(Score: 1) by evilviper on Saturday February 22 2014, @01:32AM
I listed dates only because it demonstrates how laughably ridiculous the claim was. I know quite well that he's completely wrong. I wouldn't ask for sources from someone who claimed the moon is made of cheese, either. At best, that would make it seem that there's any possibility he's no utterly wrong, which he is. He was free to provide citation up-front, and is still able to provide them now, even though I didn't ask for them.
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(Score: 1) by Anthony J. Bentley on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:26AM
Why would KMS be a misfeature? It allows for faster graphics drivers and better security: graphics hardware access gets restricted to the kernel instead of the X process; and X is something you want to have as little privilege as possible, as described for example in this talk [media.ccc.de]. (If you have the time, that talk is definitely worth watching all the way through.) In current OpenBSD snapshots it's already possible to disable aperture access [openbsd.org] while using KMS drivers.
(Score: 1) by evilviper on Saturday February 22 2014, @01:40AM
KMS is a misfeature, because restarting X11 doesn't reinitialize the graphics driver anymore. If your video card driver has ANY bugs at all, you have to reboot the entire system, rather than being able to restart X11. I've seen this first-hand with older Intel graphics.
It's patently anti-Unix philosophy to have booting-up to a text console depend on something as large and complex as graphical video card drivers. Now instead of an upgrade possibly breaking graphics, it renders your system entirely unusable even from the command-line where you might fix it. Prioritizing graphics performance over system stability is utterly wrong-headed.
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(Score: 1) by ld a, b on Friday February 21 2014, @07:05PM
Leaving aside the points raised by other people, I think you are forgetting why someone would consider OpenBSD for anything in the first place.
I don't know enough about network security or RNGs to criticize, but FreeBSD exploit mitigation is abysmal. They are just now starting to consider implementing ASLR. Stack smashing protection is only available for the base system(ie. not your desktop). This means that about just any stack corruption bug can be trivially exploited by a stack smashing aficionado in a few minutes real time.
Even if we assume that their jailing system is able to and actually set up correctly to prevent the exploit from taking over more processes, I can tell you I wouldn't like to run a Desktop with say an pwned web browser running arbitrary code.
In TFA case, he has to provide desktops for clueless users who, for all we know, will attempt to download porn and angry birds at any chance they get, from their nuclear plant controlling terminals. I can see why they would go with OpenBSD.
10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.
(Score: 1) by caseih on Friday February 21 2014, @08:35PM
Even if you are on a Linux machine that does not use systemd as process 1, if you run Gnome 3 you have to run parts of systemd, such as logind. systemd is also tied fairly closely to the Linux kernel, although I'm sure systemd could be hacked to work rather well on BSD, with either support added to the BSD kernel, or some other kind of layer.
So either you port systemd to BSD, or you modify Gnome 3 to run on BSD without systemd.
As a side note, after updating my Linux Mint Debian Edition box to update 8, I found suspend when I close the lid didn't work anymore. I'm not sure if this is a bug (IE intended behavior) or not, but you can fix it by by setting init to systemd. Everything seems to work fine, although all the init scripts are currently old-school rc scripts. I'll eventually switch them for their systemd-native service files, which are already in place actually.