On 2020-04-13 01:19, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
[ setting CC to a more appropriate -wireless@ list ]
On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 07:20:14PM -0500, Jason Bacon wrote:
...
I think [well-working gfx stack] a great long-term goal, but it will
take a significant investment of man-hours to get us there. In the
meantime there's a lot of lower-hanging fruit, like minor improvements
to the bsdinstall UI, external media mounting, etc.
What I find more frustrating when reading similar articles (they are
all more or less the same) is that they rarely focus on FreeBSD's *real*
problems (and no, that's not the awkward installer, having to manually
find working DRM port + xf86-video driver combination, search for the
scattered knowledge of which magic lines to add to /etc/rc.conf and/or
/boot/loader.conf, read the Handbook N times before one can set up their
bluetooth mouse, et cetera). While installer's issues, better defaults,
bash vs sh, sudo, modelines, and those other little things might seem
significant for someone coming from Ubuntu, it would take them a day
to learn, adopt, and get back most, if not all, from their previous
environment. Our real problems aren't solved that easily, and being
solved painfully slowly.
Leaving X.org/DRM mess aside, we lack a lot in our laptop department.
Our WiFi stack is essentially maintained solely by adrian@, and he's
currently not very active. Some ~4 y.o. cards like BCM43228 are still
not supported [1]. If you search for "atheros" in our Bugzilla, it
returns 13 bugs, the latest action being on 2019-01-26 (reassignment).
AR5B22 WLAN+Bluetooth combo does not work/broken, discussion [2] had
ended nowhere.
Realtek 5209 card readers are quite common and also do not work; the
WIP OpenBSD driver porting effort [3] is stuck because apparently
something is missing in FreeBSD [subsystems], although [the] driver
seems to faithfully implement the OpenBSD [code]. No kernel hacker
had chimed in to help. :-(
Our WMI stack is unmaintained and incomplete: brightness and multimedia
keys do not work on many laptops despite corresponding kernel modules
being loaded.
This list goes on. Yes, these are deep, hard problems, not the low-
hanging fruit, but if Foundation decides where to spend some money,
I'd rather see it considers these rather than bsdinstall UI, external
media mounting, or some other "lipstick on a pig" type of tasks.
./danfe
[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=202501
[2] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-wireless/2019-April/008660.html
[3] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521
Just to be clear, I was not suggesting that the foundation spend money
on low-hanging fruit.
What I'm saying is that we can make the desktop experience significantly
better by fixing the easy issues before the foundation considers an
investment.
I suspect that some developers might not think fixing a WiFi issue is
worth their time when there are so many other problems with setting up a
desktop system. On the other hand, if it's easy to build a desktop
machine that mostly works, and WiFi support is one of only a few obvious
shortcomings, that perception might be different.
I'll also add that I'm not a proponent of of even trying to make FreeBSD
attractive to people hung up on some of the trivia mentioned in articles
like this one. I think our primary focus should be on attracting
potential contributors, not average Joes who will only make demands on
our time. For that, we don't need a desktop experience for the
technically clueless, just one that a reasonably savvy user can easily
manage so they can focus on their real work.
JB
--
Earth is a beta site.
_______________________________________________
freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org mailing list
https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-wireless
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-wireless-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
