FreeBSD developer Scott Long told ZDNet Australia sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday that the operating system, descended from the Unix derivative BSD, is "quickly approaching" feature parity with Linux.
"Lots of work is going on to make FreeBSD more friendly on the desktop," Long said. "Within the year, we expect to have, or be near, parity with Linux."
The main focus of developers is to integrate FreeBSD with the GNOME and KDE desktop environments, and to add plug-and-play hardware capabilities.
"Developers are doing work so you can plug in a USB stick and have it appear on the desktop and just work, without having to mess around with command prompts and work out arcane commands," Long said.
Joe Clarke, who leads the team of developers working on FreeBSD for the desktop, said in a recent interview that developers are primarily working on integrating FreeBSD with GNOME but hope to be able to add KDE support in the future, due to the work that is going on to create a set of common interfaces and tools for the environments.
One of the priorities for developers is to get GNOME's hardware abstraction layer--which handles hardware-specific code--working with FreeBSD, Clarke said in an interview with BSDTalk.
"Getting HAL, the hardware abstraction layer project, successfully working on FreeBSD would be a great win. It's not a silver bullet, it's not going to make us perfect by any means, but it'll go a long way to bringing in some much-needed cool desktop features to FreeBSD," Clarke said in the interview.
One problem that FreeBSD developers have faced is that GNOME developers tend to be focused on Linux rather than considering other desktop operating systems.
"The modules that they're starting to consider don't have FreeBSD (support), don't have Solaris (support) -- they're very Linux-specific," Clarke said. "My opinion -- and I don't have any evidence to back this up, but from the conversations I hear on the list--is that the majority of the core GNOME developers don't use anything but Linux as a primary GNOME development platform."
The FreeBSD team members are not the only developers getting the operating system working on desktops. The DesktopBSD and PC BSD projects are also working on a version of FreeBSD for desktops.
Earlier this week, the FreeBSD team released version 6.1 of the operating system. One of the main features in FreeBSD 6.1 is improved file system stability, which has been made more "solid, fast and sturdy," according to Long.
"The thing we worked hardest on for this release was file system stability," Long said on Thursday. "We did stress tests, found some more bugs and fixed them. For users with high-load file servers, this is probably the best release yet for them."
More information on FreeBSD 6.1 can be found on the project Web site.
Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from London. For more coverage from ZDNet UK, click here.
The FreeBSD web site is now the stand-out best of the BSD sites (BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) with its recent upgrade. Very nice.
"quickly approaching" feature parity with Linux – of course when that happens, the rest of the Linux distro’s will have moved on again.
BSD seems to be appealing to somewhat of a niche market – OpenBSD is undoubtedly the most secure of the BSD brigade, however, that’s probably largely due to it’s lower profile than Windows. Were that to change, it would probably become more of a focus for hackers.
I’m a little concerned about the mindset of the lead developers of BSD, and to a large extent Linux, focussing too much on the lesser important features and not enough on the users themselves. When will they begin to market their product to the drivers of IT – the users and the business managers – not the Linux bigots. The Linux bigots are the worse thing to happen to Linux, eliminating all reasoned and empathic discussion about the real issues important to the non-technical users.
They must also focus on the developers of popular software and offer big incentives to produce a version of their product for this platform. And to the administrators, yes even the dumb ones, who have to support it once it’s replaced all the windows desktops.
The Linux/GNU community have to swallow their pride, look at the scoreboard, and accept that their dreams are never going to happen unless they look to what the industry leaders are doing.
Take Microsoft for example. They had an obviously technically deficient product in DOS and added OEM hardware lock-in contracts, massive communication and marketing programs, and evolved into a product that is now far more customer-demanded than Linux will probably ever be. If that is what Linux/BSD wants, then that is what the Linux/BSD community/companies have to do.
I wish BSD all the best in the future but I fear it’s just going to be the same as it has been, with possibly yet another DSN off-shoot at some point, and another Linux distro the week after that.
Instead of the dozens of different distro’s out there, the best thing (IMHO) would be to combine all the Linux/BSD distro’s into one and begin a marketing and publicity campaign targeted at Kids/Mums/Dads/Grampas/dummies like me, to rival Microsoft.
Win the crowd - and you’ll win your freedom (now where have I heard that before?)