A known and usual problem with alternative operating systems is getting them on normal users' desktops. OEMs won't take you seriously until you gain massive traction, and even then your chances are still pretty low. So, iXsystems, PC-BSD's parent company, decided to take matters into its own hands, and has unveiled a PC-BSD workstation, with a PC-BSD laptop under way.
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Member since:2008-02-26
Member since:2008-07-15
You are voting with your money(and this also goes to OEMs). Don't vote for the Ass-Rapers Party.
Oh yes, people are voting with their money. It's a shame the rather small (by comparison) amount of people who care about open source vs proprietary don't really have enough buying power to make a dent as compared to those who don't... and usually, we end up voting the other way than the masses. People are voting with their money, and we're getting proprietary everything because of it since, like it or not, most people don't care as long as it works.
Member since:2005-09-22
So what then is the appropriate hardware solution for an engineering company who's computing requirements demand 4-8 CPU cores, 8-16GB RAM, and a hefty high performance graphics card for visualization? You're basically stuck with an x64 + nVidia workstation running Linux or Solaris. There's the ATI route but at the moment their open source drivers don't hold a flame to the proprietary drivers, and they're even more platform limited.
Sure it sucks going with the proprietary route, but the requirements are what they are. Telling your customers that your deliverables will take twice as long and cost twice as much because you just didn't "feel right" about buying the equipment necessary to get the job done on time is a laughable excuse at best; you'd never expect to stay in business.
I'm not saying that I like it, in fact quite the opposite. The lack of effective open source solutions in this realm is abysmal. Unfortunately though, that is the current state of affairs.
Member since:
2005-09-22
Seems a bit pointless to make a beefy system available with hefty graphics when we're still limited to 4GB RAM with the 32 bit nVidia driver. Sure the 64 bit driver is under investigation but it's still a long ways off. These days 64 bit workstations are really becoming necessary as data workloads are demanding > 4GB of RAM. This isn't a function of application bloat either but more so the increasingly large datasets for visualization, simulation, video processing, etc., the sort of things *nix workstations are great for. 32 bit workstations are falling by the wayside and FBSD (and by necessity PC-BSD) unfortunately has a big blow dealt against it in the 64 bit arena.
Edited 2009-06-30 03:11 UTC