Discussion about a BSD version of Mint

[j0hnny]

I know Debian has now KFreeBSD. Its installed on my PC currently however, the PC is working extremely glitchy and the DE which is Gnome 2 is forced on me. Any other OS option I choose like LXDE locks up. In addition, the Gnome 2 that's there doesn't work that well. It seems like using KFreeBSD I stepped into a time warp and went back to the days of Hardy Heron.
Would be great to see if someone could port Mint to BSD, removing all the linuxisms to do that and polishing it up. I know its a tall order but considering the NVIDIA driver is on BSD already, least there would be 3D support for people with NVIDIA cards.

I dunno maybe call the BSD version of Mint, MBSD standing for Mint BSD.

[fraze]

The GNOME team is increasingly hostile to the BSDs, so anything based on GNOME 3 (eg Cinnamon) takes a lot of work to run on *BSD. Check the GhostBSD project, they've been working to get GNOME3 running on FreeBSD for ages already. Not much luck from the looks of it.

[Monsta]

The latest GhostBSD RC seems to stick to Gnome 2 and LXDE: http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07511

[j0hnny]

Well I suppose the hard part is that Gnome 3 is probably full of Linuxisms. This is what makes it very tough to port any Linux app to BSD. In addition, if the Gnome team is that vindictive, they probably made it even more difficult to port Gnome 3. The main reason is as shown here:

http://worldofgnome.org/gnome3-porting-to-freebsd/

BSD just isn't up to speed with Linux and can't do what Gnome 3 requires at the moment.

The only thing I could think is to maybe have a build of Mint BSD without Cinnamon and perhaps a custom DE based on LXDE and LXDM. Someone is already attempting to port LXDM as seen here:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=25623

Debian seems to have went with Gnome 2 and GDM for their build of BSD. So my guess is that if Mint went with my idea above, it would mean putting a lot of work into LXDE and LXDM (assuming the porting attempt of LXDM is successful).

The other idea is to just wait for the GnomeBSD team to successfully port Gnome 3.4 to BSD like they hope to do and then from there, Cinnamon could be next.