Desktop, Wi-Fi, Graphics, User-friendliness

Thursday 3rd August 2017 13:00, room SW01. Session Chair: GavinAtkinson

A discussion session on all things related to using FreeBSD as an end user (including on the desktop and on e.g. Raspberry Pi), possibly including:

State of graphics on newer Intel chipsets
Suspend/resume
Wi-Fi
- Drivers
- Configuration
Changing networks
User-friendliness, and issues we need to solve
- Sensible package defaults
- Configuring installed daemon startup manually
- Installer issues
- Better init
Available software
- Missing?
- Old versions (Gnome 3.18?)

jonathan@ has a drm-next base package repo at https://allendale.engr.mun.ca/drm-next (broken)
Mark Johnson is working on drm-next
drm-next depends on GPLv2 LinuxKBI shim so will likely need to be a port at least until they can be rewritten
TODO: Check DragonFly linuxkpi for needed functionality
drm-next will hopefully fix use of external displays/projectors

Need drivers for some WiFi devices
- Which?
  - Broadcom 11ac and newer 11n, PCI and SDIO (e.g. RPi)
Need HID over I2C (import from OpenBSD?)
- Touchpads
- Touchscreens
SDIO work is happening, which is necessary for some WiFi

Sometimes works / sometimes won't work without X
Many laptops without video drivers can suspend/resume but with video disabled after resume
Debugging? Page on the wiki that is out of date?
Nice to have a script that will S/R many times to determine cause of failure

Regularly discussed, but little progress. We know what needs doing, it just needs doing.
Timer coalescing/callouts now exists but isn't exposed to userland
(e.g.) /etc/periodic should delay until running on mains power
anacron offers ability to say “this needs doing” as opposed to “do this now”

BSDInstall could use a lot of love. BSDInstall asks too many questions, and is often confusing to users.
Dialog and libDialog are GPL licensed, and if we want a GPL free 12.0, we need to entirely replace these or the installer.
Many Linuxes have a better installer than us now - we've not developed ours much while they have.
- Independent two-stage installers:
  1. Configure
    - Probe hardware
    - Make decisions (e.g., “desktop or server profile?”)
    - Configure the system
    - Copy UCL configuration file to FAT partition on installer
  2. Install
    - Read UCL config file
    - Apply configuration (unattended)
Why do we ask for both keyboard and timezone?
Something that can be run to say what will/won't be supported would be quite nice
Making install image FAT32 could bring several advantages
- Easy ability to customise with a custom UCL file
- Easy ability to add/remove packages from any OS
More feedback from installer: Did DHCP actually work? etc

A patch exists in phabricator from Allan Jude to optionally install Xorg, lumina, and a login manager, to get a working desktop directly out of the installer. Does this make sense? [D11841](https://reviews.freebsd.org/D11841)
Should we choose one desktop as the “default”? But let's not rule out the ability to select others.
Discussion about how devd offers 1-to-1 messaging but generally for a desktop you want a messagebus style setup
- Insert a CD, both the desktop and any media players you have open probably want to know
- Plug in a USB camera - desktop needs to know, webcamd needs to know, etc
- Change timezone, many things need to know