FreeBSD Gripe List

FreeBSD is my operating system of choice, both for servers and workstations. The FreeBSD development team and all of its contributors have produced some amazing code. A lot of other great open source projects have also helped to make FreeBSD what it is.

But FreeBSD releases are slipping. Important details are getting overlooked. Progress in some important areas is not being made (starting with an overhaul of the installation process). I fear that matters will be getting worse soon, because of Wind River's decision to dump FreeBSD.

• FreeBSD's installation program needs a major overhaul. It is very unhelpful to new users, and it just isn't very impressive because it is still text based.
• xfree86 version 4 is not installed by default
• Gnome and Sawfish and Enlightenment are cracking at the seams. With FreeBSD 4.4, Gnome doesn't know that it is using Sawfish as a window manager.
• Very few themes are installed. An overall theme manager would be really cool, especially if it integrated with themes.org
• The first disk is always missing useful packages because it is full of international packages.
• Sound - The drivers for my sound card do not handle interrupt sharing. Is this a failing of FreeBSD or just the drivers? I can only make sound work if I disable Plug 'n' Play OS in by BIOS config, but then other drivers fail when I boot Windows. a) why can't a driver share interrupts, and b) why can't FreeBSD make sure the sound card is not sharing an interrupt?
• Icons - Developers of GTK applications tend to supply icons with the source distribution so that users can add them to their Gnome panel. Yet precompiled packages distributed with FreeBSD seem to leave them out of the distribution. I have to go download the source to get them, even when I install the program from a binary package.
• IPv6 DNS Lookups - IPv6 is neat, but I still work in the real world where the only thing deployed is IPv4. I can build a kernel without IPv6 support, but that doesn't stop IPv6 aware programs from doing DNS lookups of IPv6 AAAA records. Normally this only adds a minor delay, but sometimes I'm behind a slow firewall and the extra lookups are excruciating. It would be nice if the resolver code or the IPv6 applications knew that an IPv6 connection is impossible and that an AAAA record lookup is pointless.