Originally posted by Alex Sarmiento
View Post
On the topic of Wayland, video games like Unigine Oilrush have no problems drawing at the refresh rate with the right hardware and driver combinations while Xorg performs extremely well on my system. In the few cases where Xorg does not, I have found flaws in software, such as usleep() being used in konsole's draw routine. While Statements from users claim that Wayland is some wonder cure, statements from Wayland developers say that any improvements would likely be imperceptible. I have also yet to see an explanation as to how a protocol that ran smoothly on hardware from the 1980s could be a performance bottleneck on hardware today.
As for "outdated and less drivers", Linux's hardware support is not a superset of FreeBSD's. Furthermore, the drivers that Linux does have can often be buggy. r8169 is a good example of this (although not necessarily on all supported chips). Several Gentoo developers have had problems with it and multiple kernel developers working on the BQL patches stated on mailing lists earlier this year that the driver is broken. Between merging buggy hardware support and not having hardware support, I would prefer it if Linux opted to forgo hardware support. Distribution developers like to be told when they are beta testing buggy software. Having it in the tree when it is known to be broken simply wastes our time.
On the topic of init systems, systemd and its dependencies add 2 million lines of code to the early boot process, which is a significant reliability concern. Furthermore, its lack of support for other platforms raises questions regarding code quality. I would consider not having it to be a feature, rather than a liability. At the same time, Gentoo has its own next generation init system called OpenRC that is implemented in 10,000 lines of code and works on both Linux and *BSD. It has been offered to the FreeBSD developers, but if you must have it now, you are always welcome to install Gentoo FreeBSD. Interestingly, Lennart Poettering has stated that systemd is incapable of starting X and needs Wayland to do it. It is a bit odd to me that 2 million lines of code (when including dependencies) could not include code for launching X, but somehow, Gentoo has managed to do it with an init system that only has 10,000 lines of code. That is not systemd's only issue, but it is food for thought.
On the topic of Pulse Audio, can you tell me what it does for you that that OSS does not do? I mean something that you actually use. With that said, I find it hard to believe that the audio framework should keep you from using an OS. With that said, we could probably get its benefits if were to devise some kind of OSS forwarding support for SSH.
Lastly, FreeBSD has multiple distributions. Here are some of the more popular open source ones:
- FreeBSD upstream
- Gentoo FreeBSD
- PC-BSD
- ZFS Guru
- pfSense
- FreeNAS
Comment