[scythe]

It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and never looked back. Which is not solely a license issue; you can definitely release GPL software for FreeBSD, but the "license war" culture (to the extent it really existed) may have been an issue.

And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.

[Paianni]

GNOME prioritises Linux now but it shipped with Solaris from 2003 onwards and Sun contributed accessibility features around that time.

[em-bee]

i think what the chaos did was enable more individual contributors. you didn't have to join the BSD team to get a core OS tool accepted into the system. anyone could just mix and match the tools and apps they liked. it's not that BSD prevented that but that they just didn't invite it. you can create your own spin of a distribution and if it gets enough users and contributors it gets accepted as an official version. there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel. try making a official BSD spin using GNU coreutils.

[znpy]

> there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel.

it's dead as of july 2023: https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ :

> The development of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has officially terminated as of July 2023 due to the lack of interest and volunteers. You may find the official announcement here[1]

here[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/07/msg00176.html

[znpy]

> BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans.

oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.

The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).

Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")

Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).

And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).

I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?

Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.