We're all a bit short on time and resources and thus shipping an additional spin is something to think carefully about. Currently we have two developers using MATE and two others using Xfce, which is excellent. I will definitely stick with MATE on my machines since that's what my wife is used to (and she's not nearly as fond of
So far, GhostBSD has been all about making traditional desktop users happy and that's definitely a goal we shouldn't let go. The project would greatly benefit from more developers, though, and I wonder if offering a spin aiming at what a lot of more technical people love, might be something we should try. I'm thinking of a GhostBSD spin with a tiling WM and things like the VimFx plugin preinstalled that allows Firefox to be controlled in a VIM-style manner. The idea is to get rid of the mouse/touchpad/etc. as much as possible, allowing the user to keep the hands on the keyboard nearly all the time without having to take them off.
I did a little investigation. There are a lot of tiling window managers out there and most of them claim to be "easily hackable" (which probably is appealing to a lot of programmers). The two "big" ones are xmonad and Awesome. The former is BSD-licensed but written and configured in Haskell which probably isn't what a whole lot of people want to learn just to properly configure their WM. The latter is GPL'd and configured in LUA. Probably also not quite perfect. There are others that are configured using text files which might be a better fit. And there's qtile, a WM written and configured in python. Since that's GhostBSD's unofficial first language, I felt that it might be the ideal candidate, especially as it's also liberally licensed (MIT).
I was quite happy to find that it's even in ports already. However I soon figured that this port is > 5 years old and currently broken. I did my best to update and fix it - which turned out to not be so easy since some dependencies for the new version changed and it now depends on one library that isn't in ports, yet. That library has two more dependencies with missing ports and - oh the irony! - those are Haskell libraries.
Fortunately they are build-time only dependencies. I prepared ports for everything and made them pass a "synth test" run. Then I created two PRs on the FreeBSD bugtracker; one is just asking to mark the qtile port "broken" the other is my first attempt at submitting a port and getting it committed.There has been a little discussion about the latter, but not even the first one (which should be a quicky!) has been done and closed after more than 10 days. Yes, I know that it's a volunteer effort and I'm willing to wait and give it the time it needs. But I wonder if we couldn't import those ports into our tree for now and test things here to speed things up a little?
If anybody here is in favor of doing this, for the first step I'd only need another pair of eyes to take a look at two rather simple ports which could then be imported. So what do you think? Does a tiling spin make sense at all? Should we give it a try (again, I'm willing to explore things and hope to eventually be able to use it as my daily driver)? Can we import some more custom ports after making sure that they build?
