Questions about current stable version of dragonflybsd regarding drivers and desktop environment

[Bret Busby]

On 27/05/2016, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff <czarkoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> John Marino said:
>> So in other words, what does your quote about the relationship between
>> FreeBSD and DragonFly have to do with anything?
>
> These days Linux distributions call themselves "operating systems."  I
> bet a lot of people who were not around 10 years ago reading
>
> | DragonFly BSD was originally forked from FreeBSD 4.8 in June of 2003,
> | by Matthew Dillon. The project was originally billed as "the logical
> | continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series", as quoted in Matthew Dillon's
> | announcement, but this description has long since become obsolete.
>
> think that DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD are distributions of the same "BSD"
> operating system, pretty much like Ubuntu Linux and Debian GNU/Linux are
> distributions of the same "Linux" operating system.
>
> I am amazed that OpenBSD mailing lists are not spammed with questions
> "Why  my favorite NetBSD kernel module does not work?"
>
> Probably dragonflybsd.org should stress more that it is a proper
> operating system, and not a distribution or a tiny patchset against
> FreeBSD.
>
> --
> Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
>

Thank you, for making this a constructive thing again, instead of the
flame war that the other one started.

I am currently a user of UbuntuMATE. Ubuntu Linux started as a
derivative of Debian Linux, then, went its own way, from what I
understand. That included some enhancements over Debian Linux. Ubuntu
Linux can install some .deb packages, that can be installed and run on
Linux.

I switched from Debian Linux to UbuntuMATE, because, at the time,
Ubuntu Linux was the only non-Microsoft operating system, that had
drivers for both the CPU and the GPU, on this computer. Debian Linux
had neither a driver for the CPU, nor a driver for the GPU. (By the
GPU, I refer to the nVIDIA one, not the one that is part of the Intel
Haskell architecture in the system).

At the time, DragonflyBSD had a driver for the CPU; the Intel Haskell
architecture, and was the only  non-Microsoft operating system, other
than Ubuntu Linux, that I found, that had that driver. But,
DragonflyBSD did not have a driver for the nVIDIA GPU.

>From what I understood, DragonflyBSD was way ahead of FreeBSD, in
terms of drivers.

I did not know that FreeBSD software, in whatever form (packages or
otherwise), would not run on DragonflyBSD.

>From what I understand of Linux, a "binary" can be installed on any
distribution of Linux, and, a "package" requires a package manager,
and, some Linux distributions have package mangers that can deal with
some package types (eg, Ubuntu and Debian may be able to both deal
with .deb packages, and, so might some other distributions, and,
package managers may be available for some distributions, to deal with
packages designed for other distributions (I believe that a package
manager is available for the .deb package based systems, that can deal
with .rpm packages) ).

So, I figured that it could be possible that this new (about a day or
two, old) driver for the nVIDIA GPU, being a binary, rather than a
distribution (eg freeBSD or DragonflyBSD or OpenBSD, etc, etc, etc)
specific package, could be installed and run on DragonflyBSD. I did
not expect a flame war to be started over the issue.

Such contempt for inexperience, and hateful behaviour, as demonstrated
in this matter (not by the person, whose message is above), is not
conducive to increasing the popularity of the operating system.

If a person makes an incorrect assumption, such as I did, it would
have been sufficient to have simply stated, in a friendly manner, that
the particular driver would not work with DragonflyBSD, instead of
flying around in a rabid rage with no sense being able to be drawn
from the ravings.


-- 

Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia

..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992

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