PC-BSD Releases Lumina Desktop 0.8.2

[Luke_Wolf]

I thought KDE used lgpl3 licenses for icons. Is lumina accepting copyleft licenses? I thought most bsd people preferred permissive licenses.

It's a question of containment, if the copyleft can only effect the project that it's applied to (i.e. weak (which is to say non-viral) copyleft) then the BSDs are accepting of it even if they prefer looser licenses, if it applies to derivative works then they're likely to make their own.

[xfce_fanboy]

Well it's not necessarily a bad thing but I see more and distros getting their own desktop. I like how lxde and razor-qt came together and but hey there's also the idea that "the more the merrier" so bring on the desktops. Btw I'll still use KDE and maybe lxqt.
Hopefully some of these desktops will be adopted by more than one distro and will get to be as mature as KDE is.

I generally agree with that sentiment, but BSD desktops are a whole other beast. I understand the need for Lumina to be the desktop which squarely targets PC-BSD (with ports to the other BSD's likely.) I understand that it's quite a challenge to get any Linux-focused DE besides Xfce to run on DragonFlyBSD, for instance. Perhaps Lumina signals the end of trying to get Linux-centric DE's to run on *BSD.

Linux is well-served by Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, MATE, Xfce and LXQt; it would be a fool's errand to try porting Lumina to Linux at this stage.

[SystemCrasher]

Looks like Gnome 2. And hmm, PC-BSD guys are really strange. Why reinvent gnome 2? Do they lack more pressing matters? They have got half of wireless cards borked, half GPUs would refuse to work in their system, they have really sucking choice of filesystems and so on. And then they just go.... and write another DE? How smart

[tomtomme]

It looks like a mix of KDE and Gnome. It even has KDE 4 icons. I wonder how it looks under the hood in comparison to Linux DE's: phonon, dbus, pulseaudio, systemd integration (just kidding).

yeah. really looks like a inconsistent mix. a bit win xp with colors all over the place, a bit kde 4 icons, a bit gnome 2 panel layout - from a design point of view it looks just plain ugly. from a productivity point of view - maybe it can work if its stable...

[jaxxed]

Well it's not necessarily a bad thing but I see more and distros getting their own desktop. I like how lxde and razor-qt came together and but hey there's also the idea that "the more the merrier" so bring on the desktops. Btw I'll still use KDE and maybe lxqt.
Hopefully some of these desktops will be adopted by more than one distro and will get to be as mature as KDE is.

The BSD guys have a bit more reason to push their own desktop. Previously, kde, gnome and some other light dms were common, but most systems are moving into architecture that may not be available on BSD. In particular, BSD doesn't have great graphics (other than NVIDIA) support, wayland has no implementation there (and likely won't if the graphics support doesn't pull more from linux) and systemd will never get ported to any of the BSDs.

All of the architecture that was last year deciding to drop support for non-linux, is about to seriously pull away from BSD support. The BSD guys need to have something they can rely on, at least to weather missing functionality in the interim, but more likely indefinitely. In particular, it is the PCBSD guys who push this level of support on top of FreeBSD.

I'm curious if they can drop X11 and get their own wayland implementation out, and then they can leverage their great FS and jail system for app-sandboxing. I guess it actually takes a bit more to get that working though.

EDIT: on doing more research, the FreeBSD guys claim to have a wayland port, so might be able to handle wayland ported desktops after all?

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#Wayland

[drSeehas]

... Linux is well-served by Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, MATE, Xfce and LXQt; ...

Don't forget Enlightenment.

[profoundWHALE]

The BSD guys have a bit more reason to push their own desktop. Previously, kde, gnome and some other light dms were common, but most systems are moving into architecture that may not be available on BSD. In particular, BSD doesn't have great graphics (other than NVIDIA) support, wayland has no implementation there (and likely won't if the graphics support doesn't pull more from linux) and systemd will never get ported to any of the BSDs.

All of the architecture that was last year deciding to drop support for non-linux, is about to seriously pull away from BSD support. The BSD guys need to have something they can rely on, at least to weather missing functionality in the interim, but more likely indefinitely. In particular, it is the PCBSD guys who push this level of support on top of FreeBSD.

I'm curious if they can drop X11 and get their own wayland implementation out, and then they can leverage their great FS and jail system for app-sandboxing. I guess it actually takes a bit more to get that working though.

EDIT: on doing more research, the FreeBSD guys claim to have a wayland port, so might be able to handle wayland ported desktops after all?
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#Wayland

I'd really like to see Wayland up and running on the Lumina desktop, but personally, I'd wait until it was closer to it's 1 or 2 version release.

I would also like to see better graphics support, but considering everything, they're still doing a fantastic job.

[Guest]

I thought KDE used lgpl3 licenses for icons. Is lumina accepting copyleft licenses? I thought most bsd people preferred permissive licenses.

Lumina is in rather early stage of development, so they didn't focus on polishing yet. I bet they'll make icons on their own in the future.

[Luke_Wolf]

The BSD guys have a bit more reason to push their own desktop. Previously, kde, gnome and some other light dms were common, but most systems are moving into architecture that may not be available on BSD. In particular, BSD doesn't have great graphics (other than NVIDIA) support, wayland has no implementation there (and likely won't if the graphics support doesn't pull more from linux) and systemd will never get ported to any of the BSDs.

All of the architecture that was last year deciding to drop support for non-linux, is about to seriously pull away from BSD support. The BSD guys need to have something they can rely on, at least to weather missing functionality in the interim, but more likely indefinitely. In particular, it is the PCBSD guys who push this level of support on top of FreeBSD.

I'm curious if they can drop X11 and get their own wayland implementation out, and then they can leverage their great FS and jail system for app-sandboxing. I guess it actually takes a bit more to get that working though.

EDIT: on doing more research, the FreeBSD guys claim to have a wayland port, so might be able to handle wayland ported desktops after all?
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#Wayland

A couple things

• OpenBSD is developing a set of systemd compatible dbus interfaces and these will be shared amongst the BSDs
• with John Hubbard's pushing they're likely to develop their own service manager equivalent to launchd or systemd (if they don't just adopt launchd)
• Xorg has finally been ported off of hald and onto devd and the desktops are in progress of being ported
• The various BSDs are all developing a kms linux-shim which means that instead of porting KMS drivers wholesale they just have to keep up with the KMS API, which means that in the near future (okay maybe a year or so) the graphics stack won't be a problem

So there's going to be some lag but there's no reason that the Wayland DEs should be a problem.

I would argue that instead of pulling away, that the BSDs are going to have something of a renaissance in a few years. Not only are they going through huge infrastructural changes of their own, but PC-BSD is causing an amount of emphasis to be put on the desktop, and they've finally grown to the point where having their own specific desktop is a possibility. It would be absolutely foolish to count them out just yet.

[eidolon]

Now what if Lumina is ported to Linux?

You can already install it on Linux. I installed it on Debian last September, and it's also available via the Arch User Repository.